
INDOOR 
STUDIES 



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INDOOR STUDIES 



JOHN BURROUGHS 



AUTHOR OF " WAKE ROBIN,' 
" FRESH FIELDS," 



"WINTER SUNSHINE," " BIRDS AND POETS, 
SIGNS AND SEASONS," ETC., ETC. 




BOSTON AND NEW YORK 
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY 



Copyright, 1889, 
Br JOHN BURROUGHS. 

All rights reserved. 

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The Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass., V. S. A. 
Electrotyped and Printed by II. 0. Houghton & Company. 






CONTENTS. 



.3' 



— « — 

Page 
Henry D. Thoreau 1 

Science and Literature ..... 43 

Science and the Poets 67 

Matthew Arnold's Criticism .... 79 

Arnold's View of Emerson and Carlyle . . 128*- — — 

Gilbert White's Book 162 

A Malformed Giant 177 

Brief Essays : 

The Biologist's Tree of Life .... 190 

Dr. Johnson and Carlyle ..... 195 

Little Spoons vs. Big Spoons .... 203=^-" 

The Ethics of War 208 <— ~ 

Solitude 214 » 

An Open Door 222 

The True Realism 231s— -^ 

Literary Fame 236 *- 

An Egotistical Chapter 240 l — "— 



INDOOR STUDIES. 



HENRY D. THOREAU. 

In " Walden " Thoreau enumerates,, in a serio-hu- 
morous vein, his various unpaid occupations, such as 
inspector of storms, surveyor of forest-paths and all 
across-lot routes, shepherd and herder to the wild 
stock of the town, etc., etc. Among the rest he says : 
" For a long time I was reporter to a journal of no 
very wide circulation, whose editor has never yet seen 
fit to print the bulk of my contributions, and, as is too 
common with writers, I got only my labor for my 
pains. However, in this case my pains were their 
own reward." The journal to which Thoreau so play- 
fully alludes, consisting of many manuscript volumes, 
is now the property of Mr. H. G. O. Blake, an old 
friend and correspond snt of his, and his rejected con- 
tributions to it, after a delay of nearly twenty years, 
are being put into print. " Early Spring in Massachu- 
setts," " Summer," and " Winter," lately published, 
are made up of excerpts from this journal. A few of 
the passages in the former have been in print before ; 
I notice one in the " Week," one or more in his dis- 



Z INDOOR STUDIES. 

course on " Walking, or the Wild," and one in the 
essay called " Life without Principle." 

Thoreau published but two volumes in his life-time, 

— "A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers " 

— which, by the way, is mainly a record of other 
and much longer voyages upon other and less tangible 
rivers than those named in the title — and " Walden, 
or Life in the Woods." The other six volumes of his 
works, including Mr. Blake's, have been collected and 
published since his death. 

Of Thoreau's journal as published by Mr. Blake I 
think it may be said that a good deal of it is evi- 
dently experimental with the author. There is often 
an attempt to make something out of nothing by the 
mere force of words. He squeezes his subject as in 
a vice ; we feel the effort he makes, but the result is 
often not worth the labor ; the precious drop he is 
after is not forthcoming. In fact, his journal is 
largely the record of a search for something he never 
fully finds ; any fact of natural history, or botany, or 
geology which he does find is only incidental ; he 
turns it over curiously, remarks upon it, and passes 
on in his chase of the unattainable. Yet there is 
most excellent and characteristic matter in his jour- 
nal, and many valuable and interesting natural his- 
tory notes. When he wrote a book, or a lecture, or 
an essay, we are told, he went to his journal for the 
greater share of his material. He revised, and cor- 
rected, and supplemented his record from day to day 
and from year to year, till it often reflects truly his 



HENRY D. THOREAU. 3 

life and mind. He was a man so thoroughly devoted 
to principle and to his own aims in life that he seems 
never to have allowed himself one indifferent or care- 
less moment. He was always making the highest 
demands upon himself and upon others. 

In his private letters his bow is strung just as taut 
as in his printed works, and he uses arrows from the 
same quiver, and sends them just as high and far as 
he can. In his journal it appears to be the same. 

Thoreau's fame has steadily increased since his 
death, in 1862, as it was bound to do. It was little 
more than in the bud at that time, and its full leaf 
and flowering are not yet, perhaps not in many years 
yet. He improves with age ; in fact, requires age to 
take off a little of his asperity and fully ripen him. 
The generation he lectured so sharply will not give 
the same heed to his words as will the next and the 
next. The first effect of the reading of his books, 
upon many minds, is irritation and disapproval ; the 
perception of their beauty and wisdom comes later. 
He makes short work of our prejudices ; he likes the 
wind in his teeth, and to put it in the teeth of his 
reader. He was a man devoid of compassion, devoid 
of sympathy, devoid of generosity, devoid of patriot- 
ism, as these words are usually understood, yet his 
life showed a devotion to principle such as one life in 
millions does not show ; and matching this there runs 
through his works a vein of the purest and rarest 
poetry and the finest wisdom. For both these reasons 
time will enhance rather than lessen the value of his 



INDOOR STUDIES. 



contributions. The world likes a good hater and re- 
fuser almost as well as it likes a good lover and ac- 
ceptor, only it likes him farther off. 

In writing of Thoreau, I am not conscious of having 
any criticism to make of him. I would fain accept 
him just as he was, and make the most of him, defin- 
ing and discriminating him as I would a flower or a 
bird or any other product of nature — perhaps exag- 
gerating some features the better to bring them out. 
There were greater men among his contemporaries, 
but I doubt if there were any more genuine and sin- 
cere, or more devoted to ideal ends. If he was not 
this, that, or the other great man, he was Thoreau, 
and he fills his own niche well, and has left a positive 
and distinct impression upon the literature of his 
country. He did his work thoroughly ; he touched 
bottom ; he made the most of his life. He said : " I 
would not be one of those who will foolishly drive a 
nail into mere lath and plastering ; " he would beat 
about with his hammer till he found the studding, 
and no one can study his life and books and not feel 
that he really drove his nail home into good solid 
timber. He was, perhaps, a little too near his friend 
and master, Emerson, and brought too directly under 
his influence. If he had lived farther from him, he 
would have felt his attraction less. But he was just 
as positive a fact as Emerson. The contour of his 
moral nature was just as firm and resisting. He was 
no more a soft-shelled egg, to be dented by every 
straw in the nest, than was his distinguished neighbor. 



HENRY D. THOREAU. 5 

An English reviewer has summed up his estimate 
of Thoreau by calling him a " skulker," which is the 
pith of Dr. Johnson's smart epigram about Cowley, 
a man in whom Thoreau is distinctly foreshadowed, 
" If his activity was virtue, his retreat was cowardice." 
Thoreau was a skulker if it appears that he ran away 
from a noble part to perform an ignoble, or one less 
noble. The world has a right to the best there is in 
a man, both in word and deed : from the scholar, 
knowledge ; from the soldier, courage ; from the 
statesman, wisdom ; from the farmer, good husbandry, 
etc. ; and from all, virtue ; but has it a right to say 
arbitrarily who shall be soldiers and who poets ? Is 
there no virtue but virtue ? no religion but in the 
creeds ? no salt but what is crystallized ? Who shall 
presume to say the world did not get the best there 
was in Thoreau — high and much needed service 
from him ? — albeit there appear in the account more 
kicks than compliments. Would you have had him 
stick to his lead-pencils, or to school-teaching, and let 
Walden Pond and the rest go ? We should have 
lost some of the raciest and most antiseptic books in 
English literature, and an example of devotion to 
principle that provokes and stimulates like a winter 
morning. I am not aware that Thoreau shirked any 
responsibility or dodged any duty proper to him, and 
he could look the world as square in the face as any 
man that ever lived. 

The people of his native town remember at least 
one notable occasion on which Thoreau did not skulk, 



b INDOOR STUDIES. 

nor sulk either. I refer to the 30th of October, 1859, 
when he made his plea for Captain John Brown, 
while the hero was on trial in Virginia. It was pro- 
posed to stop Thoreau's mouth, persuade him to keep 
still and lie low, but he was not to be stopped. He 
thought there were enough lying low — the ranks 
were all full there, the ground was covered ; and in 
an address delivered in Concord he glorified the old 
hero in words that at this day and in the light of sub- 
sequent events it thrills the blood to read. This in- 
stant and unequivocal indorsement of Brown by Tho- 
reau, in the face of the most overwhelming public 
opinion even among antislavery men, throws a flood 
of light upon him. It is the most significant act of 
his life. It clinches him ; it makes the colors fast. 
We know he means what he says after that. It is 
of the same metal and has the same ring as Brown's 
act itself. It shows what thoughts he had fed his 
soul on, what school he had schooled himself in, what 
his devotion to the ideal meant. His hatred of slav- 
ery and injustice, and of the government that toler- 
ated them, was pure, and it went clean through ; it 
stopped at nothing. Iniquitous laws must be defied, 
and there is no previous question. " The fact that 
the politician fears," he says, referring to the repeal 
of the Fugitive Slave Law, " is merely that there is 
less honor among thieves than was supposed, and not 
the fact that they are thieves." For the most part, 
Thoreau's political tracts and addresses seem a little 
petulant and willful, and fall just short of enlisting 



HENKY D. THOREAU. / 

one's sympathies, and his carrying his opposition to 
the State to the point of allowing himself to be put in 
jail rather than pay a paltry tax, savors a little bit of 
the grotesque and the melodramatic. But his plea 
for John Brown when the whole country was disown- 
ing him, abolitionists and all, fully satisfies one's 
sense of the fitness of things. It does not overshoot 
the mark. The mark was high, and the attitude of 
the speaker was high and scornful, and uncompro- 
mising in the extreme. It was just the occasion re- 
quired to show Thoreau's metal. " If this man's acts 
and words do not create a revival, it will be the 
severest possible satire on the acts and words that do. 
It is the best news that America has ever heard." 
" Think of him — of his rare qualities ! — such a man 
as it takes ages to make, and ages to understand ; no 
mock hero, nor the representative of any party. A 
man such as the sun may not rise upon again in this 
benighted land. To whose making went the costliest 
material, the finest adamant ; sent to be the redeemer 
of those in captivity ; and the only use to which you 
can put him is to hang him at the end of a rope ! " 
" Do yourselves the honor to recognize him ; he 
needs none of your respect." It was just such radical 
qualities as John Brown exhibited, or their analogue 
and counterpart in other fields, that Thoreau coveted 
and pursued through life ; in man, devotion to the 
severest ideal, friendship founded upon antagonism, 
or hate, as he preferred to call it ; in nature the un- 
tamed and untamable, even verging on the savage and 



8 INDOOR STUDIES. 

pitiless ; in literature the heroic — " books, not which 
afford us a cowering enjoyment, but in which each 
thought is of unusual daring; such as an idle man 
cannot read, and a timid one would not be entertained 
by." Indeed Thoreau was Brown's spiritual brother, 
the last and finer flowering of the same plant — the 
seed flowering ; he was just as much of a zealot, was 
just as gritty and unflinching in his way ; a man 
whose brow was set, whose mind was made up, and 
leading just as forlorn a hope, and as little quailed 
by the odds. 

In the great army of Mammon, the great army of 
the fashionable, the complacent and church-going, 
Thoreau was a skulker, even a deserter, if you please 
— yea, a traitor fighting on the other side. 

Emerson regrets the loss to the world of his rare 
powers of action, and thinks that, instead of being 
the captain of a huckleberry-party, he might have en- 
gineered for all America. But Thoreau, doubtless, 
knew himself better when he said, with his usual 
strength of metaphor, that he was as unfit for the 
coarse uses of this world as gossamer for ship-timber. 
A man who believes that " life should be lived as ten- 
derly and daintily as one would pluck a flower," and 
actually and seriously aims to live his life so, is not a 
man to engineer for all America. If you want a 
columbiad you must have tons and tons of gross metal, 
and if you want an engineer for all America, leader 
and wielder of vast masses of men, you must have a 
certain breadth and coarseness of fibre in your hero ; 



HENRY D. THOREAU. 9 

but if you want a trenchant blade like Thoreau, you 
must leave the pot-metal out and look for something 
bluer and finer. 

Thoreau makes a frank confession upon this very 
point in his journal, written when he was but twenty- 
five. " I must confess I have felt mean enough when 
asked how I was to act on society, what errand I had 
to mankind. Undoubtedly I did not feel mean with- 
out a reason, and yet my loitering is not without a 
defense. I would fain communicate the wealth of 
my life to men, would really give them what is most 
precious in my gift. I would secrete pearls with the 
shell-fish, and lay up honey with the bees for them. 
I will sift the sunbeams for the public good. I know 
no riches I would keep back." And his subsequent 
life made good these words. He gave the world the 
strongest and bravest there was in him, the pearls of 
his life, — not a fat oyster, not a reputation unctuous 
with benevolence and easy good-will, but a character 
crisp and pearl-like, full of hard, severe words, and 
stimulating taunts and demands. Thoreau was an 
extreme product, an extreme type of mind and char- 
acter, and was naturally more or less isolated from 
his surroundings. He planted himself far beyond 
the coast-line that bounds most lives, and seems in- 
sular and solitary, but he believed he had the granite 
floor of principle beneath him, and without the cus- 
tomary intervening clay or quicksands. 

Of a profile we say the outlines are strong, or they 
are weak and broken. The outlines of Thoreau's 



10 INDOOR STUDIES. 

moral nature are strong and noble, but the direct 
face-to-face expression of his character is not always 
pleasing, not always human. He appears best in pro- 
file, when looking away from you and not toward you 
— when looking at Nature and not at man. He com- 
bined a remarkable strength of will with a nature 
singularly sensitive and delicate — the most fair 
and fragile of wood-flowers on an iron stem. With 
more freedom and flexibility of character, greater 
capacity for self-surrender and self-abandonment, 
he would have been a great poet. But his prin- 
cipal aim in life was moral and intellectual, rather 
than artistic. He was an ascetic before he was a 
poet, and he cuts the deepest in the direction of char- 
acter and conduct. He had no caution or prudence 
in the ordinary sense, no worldly temporizing quali- 
ties of any kind, was impatient of the dross and alloy 
of life — would have it pure flame, pure purpose and 
aspiration ; and, so far as he could make it, his life 
was so. He was, by nature, of the Opposition ; he 
had a constitutional No in him that could not be tor- 
tured into Yes. He was of the stuff that saints and 
martyrs and devotees, or, if you please, fanatics are 
made of, and, no doubt, in an earlier age, would have 
faced the rack or the stake with perfect composure. 
Such a man was bound to make an impression by con- 
trast, if not by comparison, with the men of his coun- 
try and time. He is, for the most part, a figure going 
the other way from that of the eager, money-getting, 
ambitious crowd, and he questions and admonishes 



HENRY D. THOREAU. 11 

and ridicules the passers-by sharply. We all see him 
and remember him, and feel his shafts. Especially 
was his attitude upon all social and political questions 
scornful and exasperating. His devotion to principle, 
to the ideal, was absolute ; it was like that of the 
Hindu to his idol. If it devoured him or crushed 
him — what business was that of his ? There was no 
conceivable failure in adherence to principle. 

Thoreau was, probably, the wildest civilized man 
this country has produced, adding- to the shyness of 
the hermit and woodsman the wildness of the poet, 
and to the wildness of the poet the greater ferity 
and elusiveness of the mystic. An extreme product 
of civilization and of modern culture, he was yet as 
untouched by the worldly and commercial spirit 
of his age and country as any red man that ever 
haunted the shores of his native stream. He put 
the whole of Nature between himself and his fel- 
lows. A man of the strongest local attachments — 
not the least nomadic, seldom wandering beyond his 
native township, yet his spirit was as restless and as 
impatient of restraint as any nomad or Tartar that 
ever lived. He cultivated an extreme wildness, not 
only in his pursuits and tastes, but in his hopes and 
imaginings. He says to his friend, " Hold fast your 
most indefinite waking dream." Emerson says his 
life was an attempt to pluck the Swiss edelweiss from 
the all but inaccessible cliffs. The higher and the 
wilder, the more the fascination for him. Indeed, 
the loon, the moose, the beaver were but faint types 



12 INDOOR STUDIES. 

and symbols of the wilclness he coveted and would 
have reappear in his life and books ; — not the cos- 
mical, the universal — he was not great enough for 
that — but simply the wild as distinguished from the 
domestic and the familiar, the remote and the surpris- 
ing as contrasted with the hackneyed and the com- 
monplace, arrow-heads as distinguished from whet- 
stones or jack-knives. 

Thoreau was French on one side and Puritan on 
the other. It was probably the wild, untamable 
French core in him — a dash of the gray wolf that 
stalks through his ancestral folk-lore, as in Audubon 
and the Canadian voyageurs — that made him turn 
with such zest and such genius to aboriginal nature ; 
and it was the Puritan element in him — strong, grim, 
uncompromising, almost heartless — that held him to 
such high, austere, moral, and ideal ends. His genius 
was Saxon in its homeliness and sincerity, in its di- 
rectness and scorn of rhetoric, but that wild revolu- 
tionary cry of his, and that sort of restrained ferocity 
and hirsuteness, are more French. He said in one of 
his letters, when he was but twenty-four : " I grow 
savager and savager every day, as if fed on raw 
meat, and my tameness is only the repose of untam- 
ableness." But his savageness took a mild form. He 
could not even eat meat ; it was unclean and offended 
his imagination, and when he went to Maine he felt 
for weeks that his nature had been made the coarser 
because he had witnessed the killing of a moose. His 
boasted savageness, the gray wolf in him, only gave 



HENRY D. THOREAU. 13 

a more decided grit or grain to his mental and moral 
nature, — made him shut his teeth the more firmly, 
sometimes even with an audible snap and growl, upon 
the poor lambs and ewes and superannuated wethers 
of the social, religious, political folds. 

In his moral and intellectual growth and experi- 
ence, Thoreau seems to have reacted strongly from a 
marked tendency to invalidism in his own body. He 
would be well in spirit at all hazards. What was 
this never-ending search of his for the wild but a 
search for health, for something tonic and antiseptic 
in nature ? Health, health, give me health, is his 
cry. He went forth into nature as the boys go to 
the fields and woods in spring after wintergreens, 
black-birch, crinkle-root, and sweet-flag; he had an 
unappeasable hunger for the pungent, the aromatic, 
the bitter-sweet, for the very rind and salt of the 
globe. He fairly gnaws the ground and the trees in 
his walk, so craving is his appetite for the wild. He 
went to Walden to study, but it was as a deer goes to 
a deer-lick ; the brine he was after did abound there. 
Any trait of wildness and freedom suddenly breaking 
out in any of the domestic animals, as when your cow 
leaped your fence like a deer and ate up your corn, 
or your horse forgot that he was not a mustang on 
the plains, and took the bit in his moutb, and left 
your buggy and family behind high and dry, etc., 
was eagerly snapped up by him. Ah, you have not 
tamed them, you have not broken them yet ! He 
makes a most charming entry in his journal about a 



14 INDOOR STUDIES. 

little boy he one day saw in the street, with a home- 
made cap on his head made of a woodchuck's skin. 
He seized upon it as a horse with the crib-bite seizes 
upon a post. It tasted good to him. 

" The great gray-tipped hairs were all preserved 
and stood out above the brown ones, only a little more 
loosely than in life. It was as if he had put his head 
into the belly of a woodchuck, having cut off his tail 
and legs, and substituted a visor for the head. The 
little fellow wore it innocently enough, not knowing 
what he had on forsooth, going about his small busi- 
ness pit-a-pat, and his black eyes sparkled beneath it 
when I remarked on its warmth, even as the wood- 
chuck's might have done. Such should be the his- 
tory of every piece of clothing that we wear." 

He says how rarely are we encouraged by the sight 
of simple actions in the street, but when one day he 
saw an Irishman wheeling home from far a large, 
damp, and rotten pine log for fuel, he felt encour- 
aged. That looked like fuel ; it warmed him to 
think of it. The piles of solid oak-wood which he 
saw in other yards did not interest him at all in com- 
parison. It savored of the wild, and though water- 
soaked, his fancy kindled at the sight. 

He loved wild men, not tame ones. Any half-wild 
Irishman, or fisherman, or hunter in his neighborhood 
he was sure to get a taste of sooner or later. He 
seems to have had a hankering for the Indian all his 
life ; could eat him raw, one would think. In fact. 
he did try him when he went to Maine, and sue- 



HENRY D. THOREAU. 15 

ceeded in extracting more nutriment out of him than 
any other man has done. He found him rather 
tough diet, and was, probably, a little disappointed in 
him, but he got something out of him akin to that 
which the red squirrel gets out of a pine-cone. In 
his books he casts many a longing and envious glance 
upon the Indian. Some old Concord sachem seems 
to have looked into his fount of life and left his image 
there. His annual spring search for arrow-heads was 
the visible outcropping of this aboriginal trace. How 
he prized these relics ! One is surprised to see how 
much he gets out of them. They become arrow-root 
instead of arrow-stones. " They are sown, like a 
grain that is slow to germinate, broadcast over the 
earth. As the dragon's teeth bore a crop of soldiers, 
so these bear a crop of philosophers and poets, and 
the same seed is just as good to plant again. It is a 
stone-fruit. Each one yields me a thought. I come 
nearer to the maker of it than if I found his bones." 
" When I see these signs I know that the subtle spir- 
its that made them are not far off, into whatever form 
transmuted." (Journal, pages 257, 258.) Our poetry, 
he said, was white man's poetry, and he longed to 
hear what the Indian muse had to say. I think he 
liked the Indian's paint and feathers. Certainly he 
did his skins, and the claws and hooked beaks with 
which he adorned himself. He puts a threatening 
claw or beak into his paragraphs whenever he can, 
and feathers his shafts with the nicest art. 

So wild a man and such a lover o£ the wild, and 



16 INDOOR STUDIES. 

yet it does not appear that he ever sowed any wild 
oats. Though he somewhere exclaims impatiently : 
" What demon possesses me that I behave so well ? " 
he took it all out in transcendentalism and arrow- 
heads. His only escapades were eloping with a 
mountain or coquetting with Walden Pond ! He 
sees a water-bug, and at once exclaims, " Ah ! if I 
had no more sins to answer for than a water-bug ! " 
Had he any more ? His weakness was that he had 
no weakness — it was only unkindness. He had a 
deeper centre-board than most men, and he carried 
less sail. The passions and emotions and ambitions 
of his fellows, which are sails that so often need to be 
close-reefed and double-reefed, he was quite free 
from. Thoreau's isolation, his avoidance of the world, 
was in self-defense, no doubt. His genius would not 
bear the contact of rough hands any more than would 
butterflies' wings. He says, in " Walden : " " The 
finest qualities of our nature, like the bloom on fruits, 
can be preserved only by the most delicate handling." 
This bloom, this natural innocence, Thoreau was very 
jealous of and sought to keep unimpaired, and, per- 
haps, succeeded as few men ever have. He says you 
cannot even know evil without being a particeps 
criminis. He did not so much regret the condition 
of things in this country (in 1861) as that he had 
ever heard of it. 

Yet Thoreau creates as much consternation among 
the saints as among the sinners. His delicacy and 
fineness were saved by a kind of cross-grain there was 



HENRY D. THOREAU. 17 

in him — a natural twist and stubbornness of fibre. 
He was not easily reduced to kindling-wood. His 
self-indulgences were other men's crosses. His atti- 
tude was always one of resistance and urge. He 
hated sloth and indolence and compliance as he hated 
rust. He thought nothing was so much to be feared 
as fear, and that atheism might, comparatively, be 
popular with God himself. Beware even the luxury 
of affection, he says — " There must be some nerve 
and heroism in our love, as in a winter morning." 
He tells his correspondent to make his failure tragical 
by the earnestness and steadfastness of his endeavor, 
and then it will not differ from success. His saint- 
liness is a rock-crystal. He says in " Walden : " 
" Probably I should not consciously and deliberately 
forsake my particular calling to do the good which 
society demands of me, to save the universe from 
annihilation ; and I believe that a like but infinitely 
greater steadfastness elsewhere is all that now pre- 
serves it." Is this crystal a diamond ? What will it 
not cut? 

There is no grain of concession or compromise in 
this man. He asks no odds and he pays no boot. 
He will have his way, but his way is not down the 
stream with the current. He loves to warp up it 
against wind and tide, holding fast by his anchor at 
night. When he is chagrined or disgusted, it con- 
vinces him his health is better — that there is some 
vitality left. It is not compliments his friends get 
from him — rather taunts. The caress of the hand 



18 INDOOR STUDIES. 

may be good, but the sting of its palm is good also. 
No is more bracing and tonic than Yes. He said : 
" I love to go through a patch of scrub-oaks in a 
bee-line — where you tear your clothes and put your 
eyes out." The spirit of antagonism never sleeps 
with Thoreau, and the love of paradox is one of his 
guiding stars. " The longer I have forgotten you, 
the more I remember you," he says to his correspond- 
ent. " My friend is cold and reserved, because his 
love for me is waxing and not waning," he says in 
his journal. The difficult and the disagreeable are 
in the line of his self-indulgence. Even lightning 
will choose the easiest way out of the house — an 
open window or door. Thoreau would rather go 
through the solid wall, or mine out through the cellar. 
When he is sad, his only regret is that he is not 
sadder. He says if his sadness was only sadder it 
would make him happier. In writing to his friend, 
he says it is not sad to him to hear she has sad 
hours : " I rather rejoice in the richness of your ex- 
perience." In one of his letters, he charges his cor- 
respondent to " improve every opportunity to be mel- 
ancholy," and accuses himself of being too easily 
contented with a slight and almost animal happiness. 
" My happiness is a good deal like that of the wood- 
chucks." He says that " of acute sorrow I suppose 
that I know comparatively little. My saddest and 
most genuine sorrows are apt to be but transient re- 
grets." Yet he had not long before lost by death his 
brother John, with whom he made his voyage on 



HENRY D. THOREAU. 19 

the Concord and Merrimack. Referring to John's 
death, he said : " I find these things more strange 
than sad to me. What right have I to grieve who 
have not ceased to wonder ? " and says in effect, af- 
terward, that any pure grief is its own reward. John, 
he said, he did not wish ever to see again — not the 
John that was dead (O Henry! Henry!), John as 
he was in the flesh, but the ideal, the nobler John, 
of whom the real was the imperfect representative. 
When the son of his friend died, he wasted no human 
regrets. It seemed very natural and proper that he 
should die. " Do not the flowers die every autumn ? " 
" His fine organization demanded it [death], and na- 
ture gently yielded its request. It would have been 
strange if he had lived." 

Thoreau was either destitute of pity and love (in 
the human sense), and of many other traits that are 
thought to be both human and divine, or else he stu- 
diously suppressed them and thought them unworthy 
of him. He writes and talks a great deal about love 
and friendship, and often with singular beauty and 
appreciation, yet he always says to his friend : 
" Stand off — keep away ! Let there be an unfath- 
omable gulf between us — let there be a wholesome 
hate." Indeed, love and hatred seem inseparable in 
his mind, and curiously identical. He writes in his 
journal that "words should pass between Mends as 
the lightning passes from cloud to cloud." One of 
his poems begins : — 



20 INDOOR STUDIES. 

' ' Let such pure hate still underprop 
Our love, that we may he 
Each other's conscience, 
And have our sympathy 
Mainly from thence. 

' ' Surely, surely, thou wilt trust me 
When I say thou dost disgust me. 
Oh, I hate thee with a hate 
That would fain annihilate ; 
Yet, sometimes, against my will, 
My dear friend, I love thee still. 
It were treason to our love, 
And a sin to God ahove, 
One iota to ahate 
Of a pure, impartial hate." 

This is the salt with which he seasons and pre- 
serves his love — hatred. In this pickle it will keep. 
Without it, it would become stale and vulgar. This 
is characteristic of Thoreau ; he must put in something 
sharp and bitter. You shall not have the nut with- 
out its bitter acrid rind or prickly sheath. 

As a man, Thoreau appears to have been what is 
called a crusty person — a loaf Avith a hard bake, a 
good deal of crust, forbidding to tender gums, but 
sweet to those who had good teeth and unction enough 
to soften him. He says he did not wish to take a 
cabin passage in life, " but rather to go before the 
mast and on the deck of the world." 

He was no fair-weather walker. He delighted in 
storms, and in frost and cold. They were congenial 
to him. They came home. " Yesterday's rain," he 



HENRY D. THOREAU. 21 

begins an entry in his journal, " in which I was glad 
to be drenched," etc. Again he says : " I sometimes 
feel that I need to sit in a far-away cave through a 
three weeks' storm, cold and wet, to give a tone to 
my system." Another time : " A long, soaking rain, 
the drops trickling down the stubble, while I lay 
drenched on a last year's bed of wild oats, by the 
side of some bare hill, ruminating." And this in 
March, too ! He says " to get the value of a storm we 
must be out a long time and travel far in it, so that 
it may fairly penetrate our skin," etc. He rejoices 
greatly when, on an expedition to Monadnock, he gets 
soaked with rain and is made thoroughly uncomforta- 
ble. It tastes good. It made him appreciate a roof 
and a fire. The mountain gods were especially kind 
and thoughtful to get up the storm. When they saw 
himself and friend coming, they said : " There come 
two of our folks. Let us get ready for them — get 
up a serious storm that will send a -packing these 
holiday guests. Let us receive them with true moun- 
tain hospitality — kill the fatted cloud." In his jour- 
nal he says : "If the weather is thick and stormy 
enough, if there is a good chance to be cold, and wet, 
and uncomfortable — in other words, to feel weather- 
beaten, you may consume the afternoon to advantage, 
thus browsing along the edge of some near wood, 
which would scarcely detain you at all in fair 
weather." " There is no better fence to put between 
you and the village than a storm into which the vil- 
lagers do not venture forth." This passion for storms 



22 INDOOR STUDIES. 

and these many drenchings no doubt helped shorten 
Thoreau's days. 

This crustiness, this playful and "willful perversity 
of Thoreau, is one source of his charm as a writer. 
It stands him in stead of other qualities — of real 
unction and heartiness — is, perhaps, these qualities 
in a more seedy and desiccated state. Hearty, in the 
fullest sense, he was not, and unctuous he was not, 
yet it is only by comparison that we miss these quali- 
ties from his writings. Perhaps he would say that 
we should not expect the milk on the outside of the 
cocoanut, but I suspect there is an actual absence of 
milk here, though there is sweet meat, and a good, 
hard shell to protect it. Good-nature and conciliation 
were not among his accomplishments, and yet he puts 
his reader in a genial and happy frame of mind. He 
is the occasion of unction and heartiness in others, if 
he has not them in himself. He says of himself, with 
great penetration : " My only integral experience is 
in my vision. I see, perchance, with more integrity 
than I feel." His sympathies lead you into narrow 
quarters, but his vision takes you to the hill-tojDS. As 
regards humanity and all that goes with it, he was 
like an inverted cone, and grew broader and broader 
the farther he got from it. He approached things, 
or even men, but very little through his humanity or 
his manliness. How delightful his account of the 
Canadian wood-chopper in " Walden," and yet he 
sees him afar off, across an impassable gulf ! — he is 
a kind of Homeric or Paphlagonian man to him. 



HENRY D. THOREAU. 23 

Very likely he would not have seen him at all had it 
not been for the classic models and ideals with which 
his mind was filled, and which saw for him. 

Yet Thoreau doubtless liked the flavor of strong, 
racy men. He said he was naturally no hermit, but 
ready enough to fasten himself, like a blood-sucker 
for the time, to any full-blooded man that came in 
his way ; and he gave proof of this when he saw and 
recognized the new poet, Walt Whitman. Here is 
the greatest democrat the world has seen, he said, 
and he found him exhilarating and encouraging, while 
yet he felt somewhat imposed upon by his heartiness 
and broad generalities. As a writer, Thoreau shows 
all he is, and more. Nothing is kept back ; greater 
men have had • far less power of statement. His 
thoughts do not merely crop out, but lie upon the 
surface of his pages. They are fragments ; there is 
no more than you see. It is not the edge or crown 
of the native rock, but a drift bowlder. He sees 
clearly, thinks swiftly, and the sharp emphasis and 
decision of his mind strew his pages with definite and 
striking images and ideas. His expression is never 
sod-bound, and you get its full force at once. 

One of his chief weapons is a kind of restrained 
extravagance of statement, a compressed exaggeration 
of metaphor. The hyperbole is big, but it is gritty, 
and is firmly held. Sometimes it takes the form of 
paradox, as when he tells his friend that he needs his 
hate as much as his love : — 



24 INDOOR STUDIES. 

" Indeed, indeed, I cannot tell, 
Though I ponder on it well, 
Which were easier to state, 
All my love or all my hate." 

Or when he says, in " "Walclen : " '-Our manners have 
been corrupted by communication with the saints," 
and the like. Sometimes it becomes downright brag, 
as when he says, emphasizing his own preoccupation 
and indifference to events : " I would not run around 
the corner to see the world blow up ; " or again : 
" Methinks I would hear with indifference if a trust- 
worthy messenger were to inform me that the sun 
drowned himself last night." Again it takes an imp- 
ish ironical form, as when he says : " In heaven I 
hope to bake my own bread and clean my own linen." 
Another time it assumes a half-quizzical, half-humor- 
ous turn, as when he tells one of his correspondents 
that he was so warmed up in getting his winter's 
wood that he considered, after he got it housed, 
whether he should not dispose of it to the ash-man, as 
if he had extracted all its heat. Often it gives only an 
added emphasis to his expression, as when he says : 
" A little thought is sexton to all the world ; " or, 
" Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as 
when you find a trout in the milk ; " but its best and 
most constant office is to act as a kind of fermenting, 
expanding gas that lightens, if it sometimes inflates, 
his page. His exaggeration is saved by its wit, its 
unexpectedness. It gives a wholesome jostle and 
shock to the mind. 



HENRY D. THOREAU. 25 

Thoreau was not a racy writer, but a trenchant ; 
not nourishing so much as stimulating ; not convincing, 
but wholesomely exasperating and arousing, which, in 
some respects, is better. There is no heat in him, 
and yet in reading him one understands what he 
means when he says that, sitting by his stove at night, 
he sometimes had thoughts that kept the fire warm. 
I think the mind of his reader always reacts health- 
fully and vigorously from his most rash and extreme 
statements. The blood comes to the surface and to 
the extremities with a bound. He is the best of 
counter-irritants when he is nothing else. There is 
nothing to reduce the tone of your moral and intel- 
lectual systems in Thoreau. Such heat as there is in 
refrigeration, as he himself might say, — you are 
always sure of that in his books. 

His literary art, like that of Emerson's, is in the 
unexpected turn of his sentences. Shakespeare 
says : — 

"It is the witness still of excellency 
To put a strange face on his own perfection." 

This " strange face " Thoreau would have at all haz- 
ards, even if it was a false face. If he could not state 
a truth he would state a paradox, which, however, is 
not always a false face. He must make the common- 
est facts and occurrences wear a strange and unfa- 
miliar look. The commonplace he would give a new 
dress, even if he set it masquerading. But the 
reader is always the gainer by this tendency in him. 



26 INDOOR STUDIES. 

It gives a fresh and novel coloring to what in other 
writers would prove flat and wearisome. He made 
the whole world interested in his private experiment 
at Walden Pond by the strange and, on the whole, 
beaming face he put upon it. Of course, this is al- 
ways more or less the art of genius, but it was pre- 
eminently the art of Thoreau. We are not buoyed 
up by great power, we do not swim lightly as in deep 
water, but we are amused and stimulated, and now 
and then positively electrified. 

To make an extreme statement, and so be sure that 
he made an emphatic one, that was his aim. Exag- 
geration is less to be feared than dullness and tame- 
ness. The far-fetched is good if you fetch it swift 
enough; you must make its heels crack — jerk it out 
of its boots, in fact. Cushions are good provided 
they are well stuck with pins ; you will be sure not to 
go to sleep in that case. Warm your benumbed 
hands in the snow ; that is a more wholesome warmth 
than that of the kitchen stove. This is the way he 
underscored his teachings. Sometimes he racked his 
bones to say the unsayable. His mind had a strong 
gripe, and he often brings a great pressure to bear 
upon the most vague and subtle problems, or shadows 
of problems, but he never quite succeeds to my satis- 
faction in condensing bluing from the air or from the 
Indian summer haze, any moi'e than he succeeded in 
extracting health and longevity from water-gruel and 
rye-meal. 

He knew what an exaggeration he was, and he 



HENRY D. THOREAU. 27 

went about it deliberately. He says to one of his 

correspondents, a Mr. B , whom he seems to have 

delighted to pummel with these huge boxing-gloves : 
" I trust that you realize what an exaggerator I am, 
— that I lay myself out to exaggerate whenever I 
have an opportunity, — pile Pelion upon Ossa to 
reach heaven so. Expect no trivial truth from me, 
unless I am on the witness-stand. I will come as 
near to lying as you can drive a coach-and-four." 

"We have every reason to be thankful that he was 
not always or commonly on the witness-stand. The 
record would have been much duller. Eliminate 
from him all his exaggerations, all his magnifying of 
the little, all his inflation of bubbles, etc., and you 
make sad havoc in his pages — as you would, in fact, 
in any man's. Of course it is one thing to bring the 
distant near, and thus magnify as does the telescope, 
and it is quite another thing to inflate a pigmy to the 
stature of a giant with a gas-pipe. But Thoreau 
brings the stars as near as any writer I know of, and 
if he sometimes magnifies a will-o'-the-wisp, too, what 
matters it ? He had a hard common sense, as well as 
an uncommon sense, and he knows well when he is 
conducting you to the brink of one of his astonishing 
hyperboles, and inviting you to take the leap with 
him, and what is more, he knows that you know it. 
Nobody is deceived and the game is well played. 
Writing to a correspondent who had been doing some 
big mountain-climbing, he says : — 

"It is after we get home that we really go over 



28 INDOOR STUDIES. 

the mountain if ever. What did the mountain say ? 
"What did the mountain do ? I keep a mountain 
anchored off eastward a little way. which I ascend in 
my dreams, hoth awake and asleep. Its broad base 
spreads over a village or two, which do not know it ; 
neither does it know them, nor do I when I ascend it. 
I can see its general outline as plainly now in my 
mind as that of Wachusett. I do not invent in the 
least, but state exactly what I see. I find that I go 
up it when I am light-footed and earnest. I am not 
aware that a single villager frequents it or knows of 
it. I keep this mountain to ride instead of a horse." 
What a saving clause is that last one, and what hu- 
mor ! 

The bird Thoreau most admired was Chanticleer, 
crowing from his perch in the morning. He saj's the 
merit of that strain is its freedom from all plaintive- 
ness. Unless our philosophy hears the cock-crow in 
the morning it is belated. " It is an expression of 
the health and soundness of Nature — a brag for all 
the world." " Who has not betrayed his Master 
many times since he last heard that note ? " " The 
singer can easily move us to tears or to laughter, but 
where is he who can excite in us a pure morning joy ? 
When in doleful dumps, breaking the awful stillness 
of our wooden sidewalk on a Sunday, or perchance a 
watcher in the house of mourning, I hear a cockerel 
crow, far or near, I think to myself, ' There is one of 
us well at any rate,' — and with a sudden gush return 
to my senses." 






HENRY D. THOREAU. 29 

Thoreau pitched his " Walden " in this key ; he 
claps his wings and gives forth a clear, saucy, cheery, 
triumphant note — if only to wake his neighbors up. 
And the book is certainly the most delicious piece of 
brag in literature. There is nothing else like it ; noth- 
ing so good, certainly. It is a challenge and a tri- 
umph, and has a morning freshness and elan. Read 
the chapter on his " bean-field." One wants to go 
forthwith and plant a field with beans, and hoe them 
barefoot. It is a kind of celestial agriculture. " When 
my hoe tinkled against the stones, that music echoed 
to the woods and the sky, and was an accompani- 
ment to my labor which yielded an instant and im- 
measurable crop. It was no longer beans that I 
hoed, nor I that hoed beans ; and I remembered with 
as much pity as pride, if I remembered at all, my 
acquaintances who had gone to the city to attend the 
oratorios." " On gala days the town fires its great 
guns, which echo like pop-guns to these woods, and 
some waif of martial music occasionally penetrated 
thus far. To me, away there in my bean-field and 
the other end of the town, the big guns sounded as if 
a puff-ball had burst ; and when there was a military 
turn-out of which I was ignorant, I have sometimes 
had a vague sense all day, — of some sort of itching 
and disease in the horizon, as if some eruption would 
break out there soon, either scarlatina or canker-rash, 
— until at length some more favorable puff of wind, 
making haste over the fields and up the Wayland 
road, brought me information of the ' trainers ! ' " 



30 INDOOR STUDIES. 

What visitors he had, too, in his little hut — what 
royal company ! — " especially in the morning, when 
nobody called." " One inconvenience I sometimes 
experience in so small a house — the difficulty of 
getting to a sufficient distance from my guest, when 
we began to utter the big thoughts in big words." 
" The bullet of your thought must have overcome its 
lateral and ricochet motion and fallen into its last 
and steady course before it reaches the ear of the 
hearer, else it may plow out again through the side 
of his head." He bragged that Concord could show 
him nearly everything worth seeing in the world or 
in nature, and that he did not need to read Dr. 
Kane's " Arctic Voyages " for phenomena that he 
could observe at home. He declined all invitations 
to go abroad, because he should then lose so much 
of Concord. As much of Paris, or London, or Berlin 
as he got, so much of Concord should he lose. He 
says in his journal : " It would be a wretched bargain 
to accept the proudest Paris in exchange for my 
native village." " At best, Paris could only be a 
school in which to learn to live here — a stepping- 
stone to Concord, a school in which to fit for this 
university." " The sight of a marsh-hawk in Con- 
cord meadows is worth more to me than the entry 
of the Allies into Paris." This is very Parisian and 
Victor Hugoish, except for its self-consciousness and 
the playful twinkle in the author's eye. 

Thoreau had humor, but it had worked a little — 
it was not quite sweet ; a vinous fermentation had 



HENRY D. THOREAU. 31 

taken place more or less in it. There was too much 
acid for the sugar. It shows itself especially when 
he speaks of men. How he disliked the average so- 
cial and business man, and said his only resource was 
to get away from them. He was surprised to find 
what vulgar fellows they were. " They do a little 
business commonly each day, in order to pay their 
board, and then they congregate in sitting-rooms, and 
feebly fabulate and paddle in the social slush ; and 
when I think that they have sufficiently relaxed, and 
am prepared to see them steal away to their shrines, 
they go unashamed to their beds, and take on a new 
layer of sloth." Methinks there is a drop of aqua- 
fortis in this liquor. Generally, however, there is 
only a pleasant acid or sub-acid flavor to his humor, 
as when he refers to a certain minister who spoke of 
God as if he enjoyed a monopoly of the subject ; or 
when he says of the good church-people that "they 
show the whites of their eyes on the Sabbath, and the 
blacks all the rest of the week." He says the greatest 
bores who visited him in his hut by Walden Pond 
were the self-styled reformers, who thought that he 
was forever singing, — 

" This is the house that I built ; 
That is the man that lives in the house that I built.' ' 

But they did not know that the third line was, — 

" These are the folks that worry the man 
That lives in the house that I built. 1 ' 

" I did not fear the hen-harriers, for I kept no 
chickens, but I feared the men-harriers rather." 



32 INDOOR STUDIES. 

What sweet and serious humor in that passage in 
" Walden " wherein he protests that he was not 
lonely in his hermitage : — 

" I have occasional visits in the long winter even- 
ings, when the snow falls fast and the wind howls in 
the wood, from an old settler and original proprietor, 
who is reported to have dug Walden Pond and 
stoned it, and fringed it with pine-woods ; who tells 
me stories of old time and of new eternity ; and be- 
tween us we manage to pass a cheerful evening with 
social mirth and pleasant views of things, even with- 
out apples or cider — a most wise and humorous 
friend, whom I love much, who keeps himself more 
secret than ever did Goffe or Whalley ; and though 
he is thought to be dead, none can show where he is 
buried. An elderly dame, too, dwells in my neigh- 
borhood, invisible to most persons, in whose odorous 
herb-garden I love to stroll sometimes, gathering sim- 
ples and listening to her fables ; for she has a genius 
of unequaled fertility, and her memory runs back 
farther than mythology, and she can tell me the orig- 
inal of every fable, and on what fact every one is 
founded, for the incidents occurred when she was 
young. A ruddy and lusty old dame, who delights 
in all weathers and seasons, and is likely to outlive all 
her children yet." 

Emerson says Thoreau's determination on natural 
history was organic, but it was his determination on 
supernatural history that was organic. Natural his- 
tory was but one of the doors through which he sought 



HENRY D. THOREAU. 33 

to gain admittance to this inner and finer heaven of 
things. He hesitated to call himself a naturalist ; 
probably even poet-naturalist would not have suited 
him. He says in his journal : " The truth is, I am a 
mystic, a transcendentalist, and a natural philosopher 
to boot," and the least of these is the natural philos- 
opher. He says : " Man cannot afford to be a nat- 
uralist, to look at Nature directly, but only with the 
side of his eye. He must look through and beyond 
her. To look at her is as fatal as to look at the head 
of Medusa. It turns the man of science to stone." 
It is not looking at Nature that turns the man of sci- 
ence to stone, but looking at his dried and labeled 
specimens, and his dried and labeled theories of her. 
Thoreau always sought to look through and beyond 
her, and he missed seeing much there was in her ; 
the jealous goddess had her revenge. I do not make 
this remark as a criticism, but to account for his fail- 
ure to make any new or valuable contribution to nat- 
ural history. He did not love Nature for her own 
sake, or the bird and the flower for their own sakes, 
or with an unmixed and disinterested love, as Gilbert 
White did, for instance, but for what he could make 
out of them. He says (Journal, page 83) : " The 
ultimate expression or fruit of any created thing is a 
fine effluence, which only the most ingenuous wor- 
shiper perceives at a reverent distance from its sur- 
face even." This "fine effluence " he was always 
reaching after, and often grasping or inhaling. This 
is the mythical hound and horse and turtle-dove 



34 INDOOR STUDIES. 

which he says in " Walden " he long ago lost, and 
has been on their trail ever since. He never aban- 
dons the search, and in every woodchuck-hole or 
muskrat-den, in retreat of bird, or squirrel, or mouse, 
or fox thatthe pries into, in every walk and expedition 
to the fields or swamps, or to distant woods, in e\ery 
spring note and call that he listens to so patiently, he 
hopes to get some clew to his lost treasures, to the ef- 
fluence that so provokingly eludes him. 

Hence, when we regard Thoreau simply as an ob- 
server or as a natural historian, there have been bet- 
ter, though few so industrious and persistent. He 
was up and out at all hours of the day and night, and 
in all seasons and weathers, year in and year out, and 
yet he saw and recorded nothing new. It is quite 
remarkable. He says in his journal that he walked 
half of each day ; and kept it up perhaps for twenty 
years or more. Ten years of persistent spying and 
inspecting of nature, and no new thing found out ; and 
so little reported that is in itself interesting, that is, 
apart from his description of it. I cannot say that 
there was any felicitous and happy seeing ; there was 
no inspiration of the eye, certainly not in the direc- 
tion of natural history. He has added no new line or 
touch to the portrait of bird or beast that I can re- 
call — no important or significant fact to their lives. 
What he saw in this field everybody may see who 
looks ; it is patent. He had not the detective eye of 
the great naturalist ; he did not catch the clews and 
hints dropped here and there, the quick, flashing 



HENRY D. THOREAU. 35 

movements, the shy but significant gestures by which 
new facts are disclosed, mainly because he was not 
looking for them. His eye was not penetrating and 
interpretive. It was full of speculation ; it was so- 
phisticated with literature, sophisticated with Con- 
cord, sophisticated with himself. His mood was 
subjective rather than objective. He was more in- 
tent on the natural history of his own thought than 
on that of the bird. To the last his ornithology was 
not quite sure, not quite trustworthy. In his pub- 
lished journal he sometimes names the wrong bird, 
and what short work a naturalist would have made 
of his night-warbler, which Emerson reports Thoreau 
had been twelve years trying to identify. It was 
perhaps his long-lost turtle-dove, in some one of its 
disguises. From his journal it would seem that he 
was a long time puzzled to distinguish the fox-colored 
sparrow from the tree or Canadian sparrow — a very 
easy task to one who has an eye for the birds. But 
he was looking too intently for a bird behind the 
bird — for a mythology to shine through his orni- 
thology. " The song-sparrow and the transient fox- 
colored sparrow — have they brought me no message 
this year ? Is not the coming of the fox-colored 
sparrow something more earnest and significant than 
I have dreamed of ? Have I heard what this tiny 
passenger has to say while it flits thus from tree to 
tree ? " "I love the birds and beasts because they 
are mythologically in earnest." (Journal, page 284.) 
If he had had the same eye for natural history he 



36 INDOOR STUDIES. 

possessed for arrow-heads, what new facts he would 
have disclosed ! But he was looking for arrow-heads. 
He had them in his mind ; he thought arrow-heads ; 
he was an arrow-head himself, and these relics fairly 
kicked themselves free of the mould to catch his eye. 

" It is surprising how thickly-strewn our soil is 
with arrow-heads. I never see the surface broken in 
sandy places hut I think of them. I find them on 
all sides, not only in corn, grain, potato, and bean 
fields, but in pastures and woods, by woodchucks' 
holes and pigeon beds, and, as to-night, in a pasture 
where a restless cow had pawed the ground." 

Thoreau was a man eminently " preoccupied of his 
own soul." He had no self-abandonment, no self- 
forget fulness ; he could not give himself to the birds 
or animals : they must surrender to him. He says 
to one of his correspondents : " Whether he sleeps or 
wakes, whether he runs or walks, whether he uses a 
microscope or a telescope, or his naked eye, a man 
never discovers anything, never overtakes anything, 
or leaves anything behind, but himself." This is half 
true of some ; it is wholly true of others. It is 
wholly true of Thoreau. Nature was the glass in 
which he saw himself. He says the partridge loves 
peas, but not those that go into the pot with her ! 
All the peas Thoreau loved had been in the pot with 
him and were seasoned by him. 

I trust I do not in the least undervalue Thoreau's 
natural history notes ; I only wish there were more 
of them. What makes them so valuable and charm- 



HENRY D. THOREAU. 37 

ing is his rare descriptive powers. He could give 
the simple fact with the freshest and finest poetic 
bloom upon it. If there is little or no felicitous see- 
ing in Thoreau, there is felicitous description : he 
does not see what another would not, but he describes 
what he sees as few others can ; his happy literary- 
talent makes up for the poverty of his observation. 
That is, we are never surprised at what he sees, but 
are surprised and tickled at the way he tells what he 
sees. He notes, for instance, the arrival of the high- 
hole in spring ; we all note it, every school-boy notes 
it, but who has described it as Thoreau does : " The 
loud peop of a pigeon woodpecker is heard, and anon, 
the prolonged loud and shrill cackle calling the thin- 
wooded hillsides and pastures to life. It is like the 
note of an alarm clock set last fall so as to wake Na- 
ture up at exactly this date, up, up, up, up, up, tip, 
up, up, up, up I " He says : " The note of the first 
bluebird in the air answers to the purling rill of melted 
snow beneath. It is evidently soft and soothing, and, 
as surely as the thermometer, indicates a higher tem- 
perature. It is the accent of the south wind, its ver- 
nacular." 

Often a single word or epithet of his tells the whole 
story. Thus he says, speaking of the music of the 
blackbird, that it has a " split-whistle " ; the note of 
the red-shouldered starling is " gurgle-ee." Looking 
out of his window one March day, he says he cannot 
see the heel of a single snowbank anywhere. He 
does not seem to have known that the shrike sang in 



38 INDOOR STUDIES. 

the fall and winter as well as in the spring ; and is 
he entirely sure he saw a muskrat building its house 
in March (the fall is the time they build) ; or that 
he heard the whippoorwill singing in September ; or 
that the woodchuck dines principally upon crickets ? 
With what patience and industry he watched things 
for a sign ! From his journal it would appear that 
Thoreau kept nature about Concord under a sort of 
police surveillance the year round. He shadowed 
every flower and bird and musquash that appeared. 
His vigilance was unceasing ; not a mouse or a squir- 
rel must leave its den without his knowledge. If the 
birds or frogs were not on hand promptly at his 
spring roll-call, he would know the reason ; he would 
look them up ; he would question his neighbors. He 
was up in the morning and off to some favorite haunt 
earlier than the day-laborers, and he chronicled his 
observations on the spot as if the case was to be tried 
in court the next day and he was the principal wit- 
ness. He watched the approach of spring as a doctor 
watches the development of a critical case. He felt 
the pulse of the wind and the temperature of the day 
at all hours. He examined the plants growing under 
water, and noted the radical leaves of various weeds 
that keep green all winter under the snow. He felt 
for them with benumbed fingers amid the wet and 
the snow. The first sight of bare ground and of the 
red earth excites him. The fresh meadow spring 
odor was to him like the fragrance of tea to an old 
tea-drinker. In early March he goes to the Corner 



HENRY D. THOREAU. 39 

Spring to see the tufts of green grass, or he inspects 
the minute lichens that spring from the hark of trees. 
" It is short commons," he says, " and innutritious." 
He brings home the first frog-spittle he finds in a 
ditch and studies it in a tumbler of water. The first 
water-beetle that appears he makes a note of, and the 
first skunk-cabbage that thrusts its spathe up through 
the mould is of more interest to him than the latest 
news from Paris or London. " I go to look for mud- 
turtles in Heywood's meadow," he says, March 23, 
1853. The first water-fowl that came in the spring 
he stalked like a pot-hunter, crawling through the 
swamps and woods, or over a hill on his stomach, to 
have a good shot at them with his — journal. He is 
determined nature shall not get one day the start of 
him ; and yet he is obliged to confess that " no mor- 
tal is alert enough to be present at the first dawn of 
spring ; " still he will not give up toying. " Can you 
be sure," he says, " that you have heard the first frog 
in the township croak ? " A lady offered him the 
life of Dr. Chalmers to read, but he would not prom- 
ise. The next day she was heard through a partition 
shouting to some one who was deaf : " Think of it — 
he stood half an hour to-day to hear the frogs croak, 
and he would n't read the life of Chalmers ! " He 
would go any number of miles to interview a musk- 
rat or a woodchuck, or to keep an " appointment 
with an oak-tree," but he records in his journal that 
he rode a dozen miles one day with his employer, 
keeping a profound silence almost all the way. " I 



40 INDOOR STUDIES. 

treated him simply as if he had bronchitis and could 
not speak — just as I would a sick man, a crazy man, 
or an idiot." 

Thoreau seems to have been aware of his defect 
on the human side. He says : " If I am too cold 
for human friendship, I trust I shall not soon be too 
cold for natural influences ; " and then he goes on 
with this doubtful statement : " It appears to be a 
law that you cannot have a deep sympathy with 
both man and nature. Those qualities which bring 
you near to the one estrange you from the other." 
One day he met a skunk in the field, and he de- 
scribes its peculiar gait exactly when he says : "It 
runs, even when undisturbed, with a singular teter 
or undulation, like the walking of a Chinese lady." 
He ran after the animal to observe it, keeping out of 
the reach of its formidable weapon, and when it took 
refuge in the wall he interviewed it at his leisure. If 
it had been a man or a woman he had met, he would 
have run the other way. Thus he went through the 
season, Nature's reporter, taking down the words 
as they fell from her lips, and distressed if a sentence 
is missed. 

The Yankee thrift and enterprise that he had so 
little patience with in his neighbors, he applied to his 
peculiar ends. He took the day and the season by 
the foretop. " How many mornings," he says in 
" Walden," " summer and winter, before yet any 
neighbor was stirring about his business, have I been 
about mine ! " He had an eye to the main chance, 



HENRY D. THOREAU. 41 

to a good investment. He probed the swamps like a 
butter-buyer, he sampled the plants and the trees and 
lichens like a tea-taster. He made a burning-glass 
of a piece of ice ; he made sugar from a pumpkin 
and from the red-maple, and wine from the sap of 
the black-birch, and boiled rock-tripe for an hour and 
tried it as food. If he missed any virtue or excel- 
lence in these things or in anything in his line, or 
any suggestion to his genius, he felt like a man who 
had missed a good bargain. Yet he sometimes paused 
in this peeping and prying into nature, and cast a re- 
gretful look backward. " Ah, those youthful days," 
he says in his journal, under date of March 30, 1853, 
" are they never to return ? when the walker does 
not too enviously observe particulars, but sees, hears, 
scents, tastes, and feels only himself, the phenomena 
that showed themselves in him, his expanding body, 
his intellect and heart. No worm or insect, quad- 
ruped or bird confined his view, but the unbounded 
universe was his. A bird has now become a mote 
in his eye." Then he proceeds to dig out a wood- 
chuck. 

In " Walden," Thoreau pretends to quote the fol- 
lowing passage from the Gulistan, or Rose Garden of 
Sadi of Shiraz, with an eye to its application to his 
own case, but as he evidently found it not in, but 
under, Sadi's lines, it has an especial significance, and 
may fitly close this paper : — 

" They asked a wise man, saying : ' Of the many 
celebrated trees which the Most High God has ere- 



42 INDOOR STUDIES. 

ated, lofty and umbrageous, they call none azad, or 
free, excepting the cypress, which bears no fruit ; 
what mystery is there in this ? ' He replied : ' Each 
has its appropriate produce and appointed season, 
during the continuance of which it is fresh and bloom- 
ing, and during their absence dry and withered ; to 
neither of which states is the cypress exposed, being 
always flourishing ; and of this nature are the azads, 
or religious independents. Fix not thy heart on that 
which is transitory ; for the Dijlah or Tigris will con- 
tinue to flow through Bagdad after the race of caliphs 
is extinct : if thy hand has plenty, be liberal as the 
date-tree ; but if it affords nothing to give away, be 
an azad, or free man, like the cypress.' " 



SCIENCE AND LITERATURE. 

Interested as I am in all branches of natural 
science, and great as is my debt to these things, yet 
I suppose my interest in nature is not strictly a sci- 
entific one. I seldom, for instance, go into a Natural 
History Museum without feeling as if I was attend- 
ing a funeral. There lie the birds and animals stark 
and stiff, or else, what is worse, stand up in ghastly 
mockery of life, and the people pass along and gaze 
at them through the glass with the same cold and un- 
profitable curiosity that they gaze upon the face of 
their dead neighbor in his coffin. The fish in the 
water, the bird in the tree, the animal in the fields or 
woods, what a different impression they make upon 
us ! 

To the great body of mankind, the view of nature 
presented through the natural sciences has a good 
deal of this lifeless funereal character of the speci- 
mens in the museum. It is dead dissected nature, a 
cabinet of curiosities carefully labeled and classified. 
" Every creature sundered from its natural surround- 
ings," says Goethe, " and brought into strange com- 
pany makes an unpleasant impression on us, which 
disappears only by habit." Why is it that the hunter, 
the trapper, the traveler, the farmer, or even the 



44 INDOOR STUDIES. 

school-boy, can often tell us more of what we want 
to know about the bird, the flower, the animal, than 
the professor in all the pride of his nomenclature ? 
Why, but that these give us a glimpse of the live 
creature as it stands related to other things, to the 
whole life of nature, and to the human heart, while 
the latter shows it to us as it stands related to some 
artificial system of human knowledge. 

" The world is too much with us," said Words- 
worth, and he intimated that our science and our 
civilization had put us " out of tune " with nature. 

" Great God! I 'd rather be 
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn ; 
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea, 
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn, 
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea, 
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn." 

To the scientific mind such language is simply non- 
sense, as are those other lines of the bard of Gras- 
mere, in which he makes his poet — 
" Contented if he might enjoy 
The things which others understand." 

Enjoyment is less an end in science than it is in 
literature. A poem or other work of the imagination 
that failed to give us the joy of the spirit would be 
of little value, but from a work of science we expect 
only the satisfaction which comes with increased 
stores of exact knowledge. 

Yet it may be questioned if the distrust with which 
science and literature seem to be more and more re- 



SCIENCE AND LITERATURE. 45 

garding each other in our day is well founded. That 
such distrust exists is very evident. Professor Hux- 
ley taunts the poets with " sensual caterwauling," and 
the poets taunt the professor and his ilk with gross 
materialism. 

Science is said to be democratic, its aims and 
methods in keeping with the great modern move- 
ment ; while literature is alleged to be aristocratic 
in its spirit and tendencies. Literature is for the 
few ; science is for the many. Hence their opposi- 
tion in this respect. 

Science is founding schools and colleges from which 
the study of literature, as such, is to be excluded ; 
and it is becoming clamorous for the positions oc- 
cupied by the classics in the curriculum of the older 
institutions. As a reaction against the extreme par- 
tiality for classical studies, the study of names in- 
stead of things, which has so long been shown in our 
educational system, this new cry is wholesome and 
good ; but so far as it implies that science is capable 
of taking the place of the great literatures as an in- 
strument of high culture, it is mischievous and mis- 
leading. 

About the intrinsic value of science, its value as a 
factor in our civilization, there can be but one opin- 
ion ; but about its value to the scholar, the thinker, 
the man of letters, there is room for very divergent 
views. It is certainly true that the great ages of the 
world have not been ages of exact science, nor have 
the great literatures, in which so much of the power 



46 INDOOR STUDIES. 

and vitality of the race have been stored, sprung 
from minds which held correct views of the physical 
universe. Indeed, if the growth and maturity of 
man's moral and intellectual stature was a question 
of material appliances or conveniences, or of accumu- 
lated stores of exact knowledge, the world of to-day 
ought to be able to show more eminent achievements 
in all fields of human activity than ever before. But 
this it cannot do. Shakespeare wrote his plays for 
people who believed in witches, arid probably believed 
in them himself ; Dante's immortal poem could never 
have been produced in a scientific age. Is it likely 
that the Hebrew scriptures would have been any 
more precious to the race, or their influence any 
deeper, had they been inspired by correct views of 
physical science ? 

It is not my purpose to write a diatribe against the 
physical sciences. I would as soon think of abusing 
the dictionary. But as the dictionary can hardly be 
said to be an end in itself, so I would indicate that 
the final value of physical science is its capability to 
foster in us noble ideals, and to lead us to new and 
larger views of moral and spiritual truths. The ex- 
tent to which it is able to do this measures its value 
to the spirit — measures its value to the educator. 

That the great sciences can do this, that they are 
capable of becoming instruments of pure culture, in- 
struments to refine and spiritualize the whole moral 
and intellectual nature, is no doubt true ; but that 
they can ever usurp the place of the humanities or 



SCIENCE AND LITERATURE. 47 

general literature in this respect is one of those mis- 
taken notions which seem to be gaining ground so 
fast in our time. 

Can there be any doubt that contact with a great 
character, a great soul, through literature, immensely 
surpasses in educational value, in moral and spiritual 
stimulus, contact with any of the forms or laws of 
physical nature, through science ? Is there not some- 
thing in the study of the great literatures of the world 
that opens the mind, inspires it with noble sentiments 
and ideals, cultivates and develops the intuitions, and 
reaches and stamps the character, to an extent that is 
hopelessly beyond the reach of science ? They add 
something to the mind that is like leaf mould to the 
soil, like the contribution from animal and vegetable 
life and from the rains and the dews. Until science 
is mixed with emotion, and appeals to the heart and 
imagination, it is like dead inorganic matter ; and 
when it becomes so mixed and so transformed it is 
literature. 

The college of the future will doubtless lay much 
less stress upon the study of the ancient languages ; 
but the time thus gained will not be devoted to the 
study of the minutiae of physical science, as contem- 
plated by Mr. Herbert Spencer, but to the study of 
man himself, his deeds and his thoughts, as illustrated 
in history and embodied in the great literatures. 

" Microscopes and telescopes, properly considered," 
says Goethe, " put our human eyes out of their natu- 
ral, healthy, and profitable point of view." By which 



48 INDOOR STUDIES. 

remai-k he probably meant that artificial knowledge 
obtained by the aid of instruments, and therefore by a 
kind of violence and inquisition, a kind of dissecting 
and dislocating process, is less innocent, is less sweet 
and wholesome, than natural knowledge the fruits of 
our natural faculties and perceptions. And the reason 
is that physical science pursued in and for itself results 
more and more in barren analysis, becomes more and 
more separated from human and living currents and 
forces — in fact, becomes more and more mechanical, 
and rests in a mechanical conception of the universe. 
And the universe, considered as a machine, however 
scientific it may be, has neither value to the spirit nor 
charm to the imagination. 

The man of to-day is fortunate if he can attain as 
fresh and lively a conception of things as did Plu- 
tarch and Virgil. How alive the ancient observers 
made the world ! They conceived of everything as 
living, being — the primordial atoms, space, form, 
the earth, the sky. The stars and planets they 
thought of as requiring nutriment, and as breathing or 
exhaling. To them fire did not consume things, but 
fed or preyed upon them, like an animal. It was not 
so much false science, as a livelier kind of science, 
which made them regard the peculiar quality of any- 
thing as a spirit. Thus there was a spirit in snow ; 
when the snow melted the spirit escaped. This spirit, 
says Plutarch, " is nothing but the sharp point and 
finest scale of the congealed substance, endued with 
a virtue of cutting and dividing not only the flesh, 



SCIENCE AND LITERATURE. 49 

but also silver and brazen vessels." " Therefore this 
piercing spirit, like a flame " (how much, in fact, 
frost is like flame !) " seizing upon those that travel in 
the snow, seems to burn their outsides, and like fire 
to enter and penetrate the flesh." There is a spirit 
of salt too, and of heat, and of trees. The sharp, 
acrimonious quality of the fig-tree bespeaks of a fierce 
and strong spirit which it darts out into objects. 

To the ancient philosophers the eye was not a mere 
passive instrument, but sent forth a spirit, or fiery 
visual rays, that went to cooperate with the rays from 
outward objects. Hence the power of the eye, and 
its potency in love matters. " The mutual looks of 
nature's beauties, or that which comes from the eye, 
whether light or a stream of spirits, melt and dissolve 
the lovers with a pleasing pain, which they call the 
bitter-sweet of love." " There is such a communica- 
tion, such a flame raised by one glance, that those 
must be altogether unacquainted with love that won- 
der at the Median naphtha that takes fire at a dis- 
tance from the flame." "Water from the heavens," 
says Plutarch, " is light and aerial, and, being mixed 
with spirit, is the quicker passed and elevated into 
the plants by reason of its tenuity." Rain-water, he 
further says, " is bred in the air and wind, and falls 
pure and sincere." Science could hardly give an ex- 
planation as pleasing to the fancy as that. And it is 
true enough, too. Mixed with spirit, or the gases of 
the air, and falling pure and sincere, is undoubtedly 
the main secret of the matter. He said the ancients 



50 INDOOR STUDIES. 

hesitated to put out a fire because of the relation it 
had to the sacred and eternal flame. "Nothing," he 
says, " bears such a resemblance to an animal as fire. 
It is moved and nourished by itself, and, by its 
brightness, like the soul, discovers and makes every- 
thing apparent ; but in its quenching it principally 
shows some power that seems to proceed from our 
vital principle, for it makes a noise and resists like 
an animal dying or violently slaughtered." 

The feeling too, with which the old philosophers 
looked upon the starry heavens is less antagonistic to 
science than it is welcome and suggestive to the hu- 
man heart. Says Plutarch in his " Sentiments of Na- 
ture Philosophers delighted in." " To men the heav- 
enly bodies that are so visible did give the knowledge 
of the Deity ; when they contemplated that they are 
the causes of so great an harmony, that they regulate 
day and night, winter and summer, by their rising 
and setting, and likewise considered these things 
which by their influence in the earth do receive a 
being and do likewise fructify. It was manifest to 
men that the Heaven was the father of those things, 
and the Earth the mother ; that the Heaven was the 
father is clear, since from the heavens there is the 
pouring down of waters, which have their spermatic 
faculty ; the Earth the mother because she receives 
them and brings forth. Likewise men, considering 
that the stars are running in a perpetual motion, and 
that the sun and moon give us the power to view and 
contemplate, they call them all Gods." 



SCIENCE AND LITERATURE. 51 

The ancients had that kind of knowledge which the 
heart gathers ; we have in superahundance that kind 
of knowledge which the head gathers. If much of 
theirs was made up of mere childish delusions, how 
much of ours is made up of hard, barren, and unprof- 
itable details — a mere desert of sand where no green 
thing grows, or can grow. How much there is in 
books that one does not want to know, that it would 
be a mere weariness and burden to the spirit to know ; 
how much of modern physical science is a mere rat- 
tling of dead bones, a mere threshing of empty straw. 
Probably we shall come round to as lively a concep- 
tion of things by and by. Darwin has brought us a 
long way toward it. At any rate, the ignorance of 
the old writers is often more captivating than our 
exact, but more barren, knowledge. 

The old books are full of this dew-scented knowl- 
edge — knowledge gathered at first hand in the 
morning of the world. In our more exact scientific 
knowledge this pristine quality is generally missing ; 
and hence it is that the results of science are far less 
available for literature than the results of experience. 

Science is probably unfavorable to the growth of lit- 
erature because it does not throw man back upon him- 
self and concentrate him as the old belief did ; it takes 
him away from himself, away from human relations 
and emotions, and leads him on and on. We wonder 
and marvel more, but we fear, dread, love, sympa- 
thize less. Unless, indeed, we finally come to see, as 
we probably shall, that after science has done its best 



52 INDOOR STUDIES. 

the mystery is as great as ever, and the imagination 
and the emotions have just as free a field as before. 

Science and literature in their aims and methods 
have but little in common. Demonstrable fact is the 
province of the one ; sentiment is the province of the 
other. " The more a book brings sentiment into 
light," says M. Taine, " the more it is a work of lit- 
erature ; " and, we may add, the more it brings the 
facts and laws of natural things to light, the more it 
is a work of science. Or, as Emerson says in one of 
his early essays, " literature affords a platform whence 
we may command a view of our present life, a pur- 
chase by which we may move it." In like manner 
science affords a platform whence we may view our 
physical existence, a purchase by which we may move 
the material world. The value of the one is in its 
ideality, that of the other in its exact demonstrations. 
The knowledge which literature most loves and treas- 
ures is knowledge of life ; while science is intent 
upon a knowledge of things, not as they are in their 
relation to the mind and heart of man, but as they are 
in and of themselves, in their relations to each other 
and to the human body. Science is a capital or fund 
perpetually reinvested ; it accumulates, rolls up, is 
carried forward by every new man. Every man of 
science has all the science before him to go upon, to 
set himself up in business with. What an enormous 
sum Darwin availed himself of and reinvested ! Not 
so in literature ; to every poet, to every artist, it is 
still the first day of citation, so far as the essentials 



SCIENCE AND LITERATURE. 53 

of his task are concerned. Literature is not so much 
a fund to be reinvested, as it is a crop to be ever new- 
grown. Wherein science furthers the eye, sharpens 
the ear, lengthens the arm, quickens the foot, or ex- 
tends man farther into nature in the natural bent 
and direction of his faculties and powers, a service is 
undoubtedly rendered to literature. But so far as it 
engenders a habit of peeping and prying into na- 
ture, and blinds us to the festive splendor and mean- 
ing of the whole, our verdict must be against it. 

It cannot be said that literature has kept pace with 
civilization, though science has ; in fact, it may be 
said without exaggeration that science is civilization 
— the application of the powers of nature to the arts 
of life. The reason why literature has not kept pace 
is because so much more than mere knowledge, well- 
demonstrated facts, goes to the making of it ; while 
little else goes to the making of pure science. In- 
deed, the kingdom of heaven in literature, as in 
religion, " cometh not with observation." This feli- 
city is within you as much in the one case as in the 
other. It is the fruit of the spirit, and not of the 
diligence of the hands. 

Because this is so, because modern achievements in 
letters are not on a par with our material and scien- 
tific triumphs, there are those who predict for litera- 
ture a permanent decay, and think the field it now 
occupies is to be entirely usurped by science. But 
this can never be. Literature will have its period of 
decadence and of partial eclipse ; but the chief inter- 



54 INDOOR STUDIES. 

est of mankind in nature or in the universe can never 
be for any length of time a merely scientific interest 
— an interest measured by our exact knowledge of 
these things ; though it must undoubtedly be an in- 
terest consistent with the scientific view. Think of 
having one's interest in a flower, a bird, the land- 
scape, the starry skies, dependent upon tbe stimulus 
afforded by the text-books, or dependent upon our 
knowledge of the structure, habits, functions, rela- 
tions of tbese objects ! 

This other and larger interest in natural objects, 
to which I refer, is an interest as old as the race it- 
self, and which all men, learned and unlearned alike, 
feel in some degree ; an interest born of our relations 
to these things, of our associations with them. It is 
the human sentiments they awaken and foster in us, 
tbe emotion of love, or admiration, or awe, or fear, 
tbey call up ; and is, in fact, the interest of literature 
as distinguished from that of science. The admiration 
one feels for a flower, for a person, for a fine view, 
for a noble deed, the pleasure one takes in a spring 
morning, in a stroll upon the beach, is the admira- 
tion and the pleasure literature feels, and art feels ; 
only in them the feeling is freely opened and ex- 
panded, wbich in most minds is usually vague and 
germinal. Science has its own pleasure in these 
things ; but it is not, as a rule, a pleasure in which 
the mass of mankind can share, because it is not 
directly related to tbe human affections and emotions. 
In fact, the scientific treatment of nature can no 



SCIENCE AND LITERATURE. 55 

more do away with or supersede the literary treat- 
ment of it — the view of it as seen through our sym- 
pathies and emotions, and touched by the ideal, such 
as the poet gives us — than the compound of the 
laboratory can take the place of the organic com- 
pounds found in our food, drink, and air. 

If Audubon had not felt other than a scientific 
interest in the birds, namely, a human interest, an 
interest born of sentiment, would he have ever writ- 
ten their biographies as he did ? 

It is too true that the ornithologists of our day for 
the most part look upon the birds only as so much le- 
gitimate game for expert dissection and classification, 
and hence have added no new lineaments to Audu- 
bon's and Wilson's portraits. Such a man as Darwin 
was full of what we may call the sentiment of science. 
Darwin was always pursuing an idea, always tracking 
a living, active principle. He is full of the ideal inter- 
pretation of fact, science fired with faith and enthusi- 
asm, the fascination of the power and mystery of na- 
ture. All his works have a human and almost poetic 
side. They are undoubtedly the best feeders of liter- 
ature we have yet had from the field of science. His 
book on the earth-worm, or on the formation of vege- 
table mould, reads like a fable in which some high and 
beautiful philosophy is clothed. How alive he makes 
the plants and the trees, shows all their movements, 
their sleeping and waking, and almost their very 
dreams — does, indeed, disclose and establish a kind 
of rudimentary soul or intelligence in the tip of the 



56 INDOOR STUDIES. 

radicle of plants. No poet has ever made the trees 
so human. Mark, for instance, his discovery of the 
value of cross-fertilization in the vegetable kingdom, 
and the means nature takes to bring it about. Cross- 
fertilization is just as important in the intellectual 
kingdom as in the vegetable. The thoughts of the 
recluse finally become pale and feeble. Without 
pollen from other minds how can one have a race of 
vigorous seedlings of his own ? Thus all Darwinian 
books have to me a literary or poetic substratum. 
The old fable of metamorphosis and transformation 
he illustrates afresh in his '• Origin of Species," in 
the " Descent of Man." Darwin's interest in nature 
is strongly scientific, but our interest in him is largely 
literary ; he is tracking a principle, the principle of 
organic life following it through all its windings and 
turnings and doublings and redoublings upon itself, in 
the air, in the earth, in the water, in the vegetable, and 
in all the branches of the animal world ; the footsteps 
of creative energy ; not why, but how ; and we follow 
him as we would follow a great explorer, or general, 
or voyager like Columbus, charmed by his candor, 
dilated by his mastery. He is said to have lost his 
taste for poetry, and to have cared little for what is 
called religion ; his sympathies were so large and 
comprehensive, the mere science in him is so perpet- 
ually overarched by that which is not science, but 
faith, insight, imagination, prophecy, inspiration — 
" substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things 
not seen ; " his love of truth so deep and abiding, 



SCIENCE AND LITERATURE. 57 

and his determination to see things, facts, in their 
relations, and as they issue in principle, so unsleep- 
ing, that both his poetic and religious emotions, as 
well as his scientific proclivities, found full scope, and 
his demonstration becomes almost a song. It is easy 
to see how such a mind as Goethe's would have fol- 
lowed him and supplemented him, not from its wealth 
of scientific lore, but from its poetic insight into the 
methods of nature. 

Again, it is the fine humanism of such a man as 
Humboldt that gives his name and his teachings cur- 
rency. Men who have not this humanism, who do 
not in any way relate their science to life or to the 
needs of the spirit, but pile up mere technical, dessi- 
cated knowledge, are for the most part a waste or a 
weariness. Humboldt's humanism makes him a stim- 
ulus and a support to all students of nature. The 
noble character, the poetic soul, shines out in all his 
works and gives them a value above and beyond 
their scientific worth, great as that undoubtedly is. 
To his desire for universal knowledge he added the 
love of beautiful forms, and his " Cosmos " is an 
attempt at an artistic creation, a harmonious repre- 
sentation of the universe that should satisfy the aes- 
thetic sense as well as the understanding. It is a 
graphic description of nature, not a mechanical one. 
Men of pure science look askant at it, or at Hum- 
boldt, on this account. A sage of Berlin says he 
failed to reach the utmost height of science because of 
his want of " physico-mathematical knowledge ; " he 



58 INDOOR STUDIES. 

was not sufficiently content with the mere dead corpse 
of nature to weigh and measure it. Lucky for him 
and for the world that there was something that had 
a stronger attraction for him than the algebraic for- 
mulas. Humboldt was not content till he had escaped 
from the trammels of mechanical science into the 
larger and more vital air of literature, or the literary 
treatment of nature. What keeps his "Views of 
Nature " and his " Scientific Travels " alive, is not 
so much the pure science which they hold, as the 
good literature which they embody. The observa- 
tions he records upon that wonderful tropical nature, 
that are the fruit of his own unaided perceptions, be- 
traying only the wiser hunter, trapper, walker, farmer, 
etc., how welcome it all is ; but the moment he goes 
behind the beautiful or natural reason and discourses 
as a geologist, mineralogist, physical geographer, etc., 
how one's interest flags ! It is all of interest and 
value to specialists in those fields, but it has no hu- 
man, and therefore no literary interest or value. 
When he tells us that " monkeys are more melan- 
choly in proportion as they have more resemblance 
to man ; " that " their sprightliness diminishes as 
their intellectual faculties appear to increase," we 
read with more attention than when he discourses 
as a learned naturalist upon the different species of 
monkeys. It is a real addition to our knowledge of 
nature to learn that the extreme heat and dryness 
of the summer, within the equatorial zone in South 
America, produces effects analogous to those pro- 



SCIENCE AND LITERATURE. 59 

duced by the cold of our northern winters. The 
trees lose their leaves, the snakes and crocodiles and 
other reptiles bury themselves in the mud, and many 
phases of life, both animal and vegetable, are wrapped 
in a long sleep. This is not strictly scientific knowl- 
edge, it is knowledge that lies upon the surface, and 
that any eye and mind may gather. One feels in- 
clined to skip the elaborate account of the physical 
features of the lake of Valentia and its surroundings, 
but the old Mestizo Indian who gave the travelers 
goat's milk, and who, with his beautiful daughter, 
lived on a little island in its midst, awakens lively 
curiosity. He guarded his daughter like a miser his 
treasure. When some hunters by chance passed a 
night on his island he suspected some designs upon 
his girl, and he obliged her to climb up a very lofty 
acacia tree, which grew in the plain at some distance 
from the hut, while he stretched himself at the foot 
of the tree, and would not permit her to descend till 
the young men had departed. Thus, throughout the 
work, when the scientific interest is paramount, the 
literary and human interest fail, and vice versa. 

No man of letters was ever more hospitable to sci- 
ence than Goethe ; indeed some of the leading ideas 
of modern science were distinctly foreshadowed by 
him ; yet they took the form and texture of litera- 
ture, or of sentiment, rather than of exact science. 
They were the Teachings forth of his spirit ; his 
grasping for the ideal clews to nature, rather than 
logical steps of his understanding; and his whole 



60 INDOOR STUDIES. 

interest in physics was a search for a truth above 
physics — to get nearer, if possible, to this mystery 
called nature. " The understanding will not reach 
her," he said to Eckermann ; " man must be capable 
of elevating himself to the highest reason to come in 
contact with this divinity, which manifests itself in 
the primitive phenomena, which dwells behind them, 
and from which they proceed." Of like purport is bis 
remark that the common observations which science 
makes upon nature and its procedure, " in whatever 
terms expressed, are really after all only symptoms 
which, if any real wisdom is to result from our stud- 
ies, must be traced back to the physiological and patho- 
logical principles of which they are the exponents." 

Literature, I say, does not keep pace with civiliza- 
tion. That the world is better housed, better clothed, 
better fed, better transported, better equipped for 
war, better armed for peace, more skilled in agricul- 
ture, in navigation, in engineering, in surgery, has 
steam, electricity, gunpowder, dynamite — all of this, 
it seems, is of little moment to literature. Are men 
better ? Are men greater ? Is life sweeter ? These 
are the test questions. Time has been saved, almost 
annihilated, by steam and electricity, yet where is 
the leisure ? The more time we save the less we 
have. The hurry of the machine passes into the 
man. We can outrun the wind and the storm, but 
we cannot outrun the demon of Hurry. The farther 
we go the harder he spurs us. What we save in 
time we make up in space ; we must cover more sur- 



SCIENCE AND LITERATURE. 61 

face. What we gain in power and facility is more 
than added in the length of the task. The needle- 
woman has her sewing-machine, but she must take 
ten thousand stitches now where she took only ten 
before, and it is probably true that the second con- 
dition is worse than the first. In the shoe factory, 
knife factory, shirt factory, and all other factories, 
men and women work harder, look grimmer, suffer 
more in mind and body, than under the old condi- 
tions of industry. The iron of the machine enters 
the soul ; man becomes a mere tool, a cog or spoke 
or belt or spindle. More work is done, but in what 
does it all issue ? Certainly not in beauty, in power, 
in character, in good manners, in finer men and 
women ; but mostly in giving wealth and leisure to 
people who use them to publish their own unfitness 
for leisure and wealth. 

It may be said that science has added to the health 
and longevity of the race ; that the progress in sur- 
gery, in physiology, in pathology, in therapeutics, has 
greatly mitigated human suffering and prolonged life. 
This is unquestionably true ; but in this service sci- 
ence is but paying back with one hand what it robbed 
us of with the other. With its appliances, its ma- 
chinery, its luxuries, its immunities, and its interfer- 
ence with the law of natural selection, it has made 
the race more delicate and tender, and if it did not 
arm them better against disease also, we should all 
soon perish. An old physician said that if he bled 
and physicked now, as in his early practice, his pa- 



62 INDOOR STUDIES. 

tients would all die. Are we stronger, more hardy, 
more virile than our ancestors ? We are more com- 
fortable and better schooled than our fathers, but 
who shall say we are wiser or happier ? " Knowl- 
edge comes, but wisdom lingers," just as it always 
has, and always will. The essential conditions of 
human life are always the same ; the non-essential 
change with every man and hour. 

Literature is more interested in some branches of 
science than in others ; more interested in meteor- 
ology than in mineralogy ; more interested in the 
superior sciences, like astronomy and geology, than 
in the inferior experimental sciences ; has a warmer 
interest in Humboldt the traveler, than in Humboldt 
the mineralogist ; in Audubon and Wilson, than in 
the experts and feather - splitters who have finished 
their tasks ; in Watts, Morse, Franklin, than in the 
masters of theories and formulas ; and has a greater 
stake in virtue, heroism, character, beauty, than in 
all the knowledge in the world. There is no litera- 
ture without a certain subtle and vital blending of 
the real and the ideal. 

Unless knowledge in some way issues in life, in 
character, in impulse, in motive, in love, in virtue, in 
some live human quality or attribute, it does not be- 
long to literature. Man, and man alone, is of peren- 
nial interest to man. In nature we glean only the 
human traits — only those things that in some way 
appeal to, or are interpretative of, the meaning or 
ideal within us. Unless the account of your excur- 



SCIENCE AND LITERATURE. 63 

sion to field and forest, or to the bowels of the earth, 
or to the bottom of the sea, has some human interest, 
and in some measure falls in with the festival of life, 
literature will none of it. 

All persons are interested in the live bird and in 
the live animal, because they dimly read themselves 
there, or see their own lives rendered in new charac- 
ters on another plane. Flowers, trees, rivers, lakes, 
mountains, rocks, clouds, the rain, the sea, are far 
more interesting to literature, because they are more 
or less directly related to our natural lives, and serve 
as vehicles for the expression of our natural emotions. 
That which is more directly related to what may be 
called our artificial life — our need for shelter, cloth- 
ing, food, transportation — such as the factory, the 
mill, the forge, the railway, and the whole catalogue 
of useful arts, is of less Interest, and literature is 
shyer of it. And it may be observed that the more 
completely the thing is taken out of nature and arti- 
ficialized, the less interest we take in it. Thus the 
sailing vessel is more pleasing to contemplate than 
the steamer ; the old grist - mill, with its dripping 
water-wheel, than the steam-mill ; the open fire than 
the stove or register. Tools and implements are not 
so interesting as weapons ; nor the trades as the pur- 
suit of hunting, fishing, surveying, exploring. A 
jack-knife is not so interesting as an arrow-head, a 
rifle as a war-club, a watch as an hour-glass, a thresh- 
ing-machine as the flying flail. Commerce is less 
interesting to literature than war, because it is more 



64 INDOOR STUDIES. 

artificial ; nature does not have such full swing in it. 
The blacksmith interests us more than the gunsmith, 
we see more of nature at his forge ; the farmer is 
clearer to literature than the merchant ; the gardener 
than the agricultural chemist ; the drover, the herder, 
the fisherman, the lumberman, the miner, are more 
interesting to her than the man of more elegant and 
artificial pursuits. 

The reason of all this is clear to see. We are em- 
bosomed in nature, we are an apple on the bough, a 
babe at the breast. In nature, in God, we live and 
move and have our being. Our life depends upon 
the purity, the closeness, the vitality of the connec- 
tion. We want and must have nature at first hand ; 
water from the spring, milk from the udder, bread 
from the wheat, air from the open. Vitiate our sup- 
plies, weaken our connection, and we fail. All our 
instincts, appetites, functions must be kept whole and 
normal ; in fact, our reliance is wholly upon nature, 
and this bears fruit in the mind. In art, in litera- 
ture, in life, we are drawn by that which seems near- 
est to, and most in accord with, her. Natural or 
untaught knowledge, how much closer it touches us 
than professional knowledge. Keep me close to na- 
ture, is the constant demand of literature ; open the 
windows and let in the air, the sun, let in health and 
strength ; my blood must have oxygen, my lungs must 
be momentarily filled with the fresh unhoused element. 
I cannot breathe the cosmic ether of the abstruse 
inquirer, nor thrive on the gases of the scientist in 
his laboratory ; the air of hill and field alone suffices. 



SCIENCE AND LITERATURE. 65 

The life of the hut is of more interest to literature 
than the life of the palace, except so far as the same 
nature has her way in both. Get rid. of the artificial, 
the complex, and let in the primitive and the simple. 
Art and poetry never tire of the plow, the scythe, 
the axe, the hoe, the flail, the oar ; but the pride and 
glory of the agricultural warehouse — can that be 
sung ? The machine that talks and walks and suf- 
fers and loves is still the best. Artifice, the more ar- 
tifice there is thrust between us and nature, the more 
appliances, conductors, fenders, the less freely her 
virtue passes. The direct rays of the open fire are 
better even for roasting a potato than conducted heat. 

What we owe to science as tending to foster a dis- 
interested love of truth, as tending to clarify the men- 
tal vision, or sharpen curiosity, or cultivating the 
spirit of fearless inquiry, or stimulating the desire to 
see and know things as they really are, would not be 
easy to determine. A great deal no doubt. But the 
value of the modern spirit, the modern emancipation, 
as a factor in the production of a great literature 
remains to be seen. 

Science will no doubt draw off, and has already 
drawn off, a vast deal of force and thought that has 
heretofore found an outlet in other pursuits, perhaps 
in law, criticism, or historical inquiries ; but is it 
probable that it will nip in the bud any great poets, 
painters, romancers, musicians, orators ? Certain 
branches of scientific inquiry drew Goethe strongly, 
but his aptitude in them was clearly less than in his 
own chosen field. Alexander Wilson left poetry for 



66 INDOOR STUDIES. 

ornithology, and he made a wise choice. He became 
eminent in the one, and he was only mediocre in the 
other. Sir Charles Lyell also certainly chose wisely 
in abandoning verse-making for geology. In the lat- 
ter field he ranks first, and in interpreting " nature's 
infinite book of secrecy," as it lies folded in the geo- 
logical strata, he found ample room for the exercise 
of all the imagination and power of interpretation he 
possessed. His conclusions have sky-room and per- 
spective, and give us a sort of poetic satisfaction. 

The true poet and the true scientist are not es- 
tranged. They go forth into nature like two friends. 
Behold them strolling through the summer fields and 
woods. The younger of the two is much the more 
active and inquiring ; he is ever and anon stepping 
aside to examine some object more minutely, pluck- 
ing a flower, treasuring a shell, pursuing a bird, watch- 
ing a butterfly ; now he turns over a stone, peers into 
the marshes, chips off a fragment of a rock, and 
everywhere seems intent on some special and partic- 
ular knowledge of the things about him. The elder 
man has more an air of leisurely contemplation and 
enjoyment — is less curious about special objects and 
features, and more desirous of putting himself in hai'- 
mony with the spirit of the whole. But when his 
younger companion has any fresh and characteristic 
bit of information to impart to him, how attentively 
he listens, how sure and discriminating is his appre- 
ciation. The interests of the two in the universe are 
widely different, yet in no true sense are they hostile 
or mutually destructive 



SCIENCE AND THE POETS. 

It is interesting to note to what extent the leading 
literary men of our time have been influenced by 
science, or have availed themselves of its results. 
A great many of them not at all, it would seem. 
Among our own writers, Bryant, Irving, Hawthorne, 
Longfellow, Whittier show little or no trace of the 
influence of science. The later English poets, Arnold, 
Swinburne, Rossetti, do not appear to have profited 
by science. There is no science in Rossetti, unless it 
be a kind of dark, forbidden science, or science in 
league with sorcery. Rossetti's muse seems to have 
been drugged with an opiate that worked inversely 
and made it morbidly wakeful instead of somnolent. 
The air of his " House of Life " is close, and smells 
not merely of midnight oil, but of things much more 
noxious and suspicious. 

Byron, Shelley, Keats, Landor seem to have owed 
little or nothing directly to science ; Coleridge and 
"Wordsworth probably more, though with them the 
debt was inconsiderable. Wordsworth's great ode 
shows no trace of scientific knowledge. Yet Words- 
worth was certainly an interested observer of the sci- 
entific progress of his age, and was the first to indi- 
cate the conditions under which the poet could avail 



68 INDOOR STUDIES. 

himself of the results of physical science. " The 
Poet," he says, " writes under one restriction only, 
namely, that of the necessity of giving immediate 
pleasure to a human Being possessed of that informa- 
tion which may be expected from him, not as a law- 
yer, a physician, a mariner, an astronomer, or a nat- 
ural philosopher, but as a Man." " The knowledge 
both of the Poet and the Man of Science," he again 
says, " is pleasure ; but the knowledge of the one 
cleaves to us as a necessary part of our existence, our 
natural and unalienable inheritance ; the other as a 
personal and individual acquisition, slow to come to 
us, and by no habitual and direct sympathy connect- 
ing us with our fellow beings." In reaching his con- 
clusion, he finally says: "The remotest discoveries 
of the Chemist, the Botanist, or Mineralogist will be 
as proper objects of the Poet's art as any upon which 
it can be employed, if the time should ever come 
when these things shall be familiar to us, and the re- 
lations under which they are contemplated by the fol- 
lowers of these respective sciences shall be manifestly 
and palpably material to us as enjoying and suffering 
beings. If the time should ever come when what is 
now called Science, thus familiarized to men, shall be 
ready to put on, as it were, a form of flesh and blood, 
the Poet will lend this divine spirit to aid the trans- 
figuration, and will welcome the Being thus produced 
as a dear and genuine inmate of the household of 
man." To clothe science with flesh and blood, to 
breathe into it the breath of life, is a creative work 



SCIENCE AND THE POETS. 69 

which only the Poet can do. Several of the younger 
poets, both in this country and in England, have made 
essays in this direction, but with indifferent success. 
It is still science when they have done with it, and 
not poetry. The transfiguration of which Words- 
worth speaks is not perfect. The inorganic has not 
clearly become the organic. Charles DeKay has 
some good touches, but still the rock is too near the 
surface. The poetic covering of vegetable mould is 
too scanty. More successful, but still rather too lit- 
eral, are several passages in Mr. Nichols' " Monte 
Rosa." A passage beginning on page 9, 

" Of what was doing on earth 
Ere man had come to see," 

is good science and pretty good poetry. 

" And that unlettered time slipped on, 
Saw tropic climes invade the polar rings, 
The polar cold lay waste the tropic marge ; 
Saw monster beasts emerge in ooze and air, 
And run their race and stow their bones in clay ; 
Saw the bright gold bedew the elder rocks, 
And all the gems grow crystal in their caves ; 
Saw plant wax quick, and stir to moving worm, 
And worm move upward, reaching toward the brute ; 
Saw brute by habit fit himself with brain, 
And startle earth with wondrous progeny ; 
Saw all of these, and still saw no true man, 
For man was not, or still so rarely was, 
That as a little child his thoughts were weak, 
Weak and forgetful and of nothing worth, 
And Nature stormed along her changeful ways 
Unheeded, undescribed, the while man slept 



70 INDOOR STUDIES. 

Infolded in his germ, or with fierce brutes, 
Himself but brutal, waged a pigmy war, 
Unclad as they, and with them housed in caves, 
Nor knew that sea retired or mountain rose. ' ' 

Whether the science in this and similar passages, 
with which Mr. Nichols' epic abounds, has met with 
a change of heai*t and become pure poetry, may be 
questioned. There is a more complete absorption 
of science and the emotional reproduction of it in 
Whitman, as there is also in Tennyson. " In Me- 
moriam " is full of science winged with passion. 

Tennyson owes a larger debt to physical science 
than any other current English poet, Browning the 
largest debt to legerdemain or the science of jugglery. 
Occasionally Tennyson puts wings to a fact of science 
very successfully, as in his " The Dragon Fly : " — 

" To-day I saw the dragon fly 
Come from the wells where he did lie. 
An inner impulse rent the veil 
Of his old husk ; from head to tail 
Came out clear plates of sapphire mail. 

" He dried his wings ; like gauze they grew: 
Through crofts and pastures wet with dew 
A living flash of light he flew." 

Keats' touches are often accurate enough for sci- 
ence, and free and pictorial enough for poetry. 

' ' Here are sweet peas, on tiptoe for a flight ; 
With wings of gentle flush o'er delicate white, 
And taper fingers catching at all things, 
To bind them all about with tiny rings." 



SCIENCE AND THE POETS. 71 

Or this by a " streamlet's rushy banks : " — 

' ' Where swarms of minnows show their little heads, 
Staying their wavy bodies 'gainst the streams, 
To taste the luxury of sunny beams 
Temper' d with coolness, how they ever wrestle 
With their own sweet delight, and ever nestle 
Their silver bellies on the pebbly sand ! ' ' 

Only a naturalist can fully appreciate Keats' owl — 
" the downy owl," as the quills and feathers of this 
bird are literally tipped with down, making it soft to 
the hand and silent in its flight. 

On the other hand, it takes a poet to fully appre- 
ciate Linnaeus' marriage of the planets and his nam- 
ing of the calyx the thalamus, or bridal chamber ; 
and the corolla, the tapestry of it. 

The two eminent poets of our own language whose 
attitude toward science is the most welcome and re- 
ceptive are undoubtedly Emerson and Whitman. Of 
the latter in this connection I have spoken elsewhere. 
Of Emerson I think it may be said that no other im- 
aginative writer has been so stimulated and aroused 
by the astounding discoveries of physics. There was 
something in the boldness of science, in its surprises, 
its paradoxes, its affinities, its attractions and repul- 
sions, its circles, its compensations, its positive and 
negative, its each in all, its all in each, its subtle 
ethics, its perpetuity and conservation of forces, its 
spores and invisible germs in the air, its electricity, 
its mysteries, its metamorphoses, its perceptions of 
the unity, the oneness of nature, etc., — there was 



72 INDOOR STUDIES. 

something in all these things that was peculiarly im- 
pressive to Emerson. They were in the direction of 
his own thinking ; they were like his own startling 
affirmations. He was constantly seeking and search- 
ing out the same things in the realm of ideas and of 
morals. In his laboratory you shall witness wonder- 
ful combinations, surprising affinities, unexpected re- 
lations of opposites, threads and ties unthought of. 

Emerson went through the cabinet of the scientist 
as one goes through a book-stall to find axi odd vol- 
ume to complete a set ; or through a collection of pic- 
tures, looking for a companion piece. He took what 
suited him, what he had use for at home. He was a 
provident bee exploring all fields for honey, and he 
could distill the nectar from the most unlikely sources. 
Science, for its own sake, he perhaps cared little for, 
and on one occasion refers rather disdainfully to " this 
jyost-mortem science." Astrology, he says, interests 
us more, " for it tied man to the system. Instead of 
an isolated beggar, the farthest star felt him, and he 
felt the star." " The human heart concerns us more 
than the peering into microscopes, and is larger than 
can be measured by the pompous figures of the as- 
tronomer." But where he could turn science over 
and read a moral on the other side, then he valued it 
— then the bud became a leaf on a flower instead of 
a thorn. 

While in London in 1848 he heard Faraday lecture 
in the Royal Institute on dla, or cross magnetism, 
and Emerson instantly caught at the idea as applica- 



SCIENCE AND THE POETS. 73 

ble in metaphysics. " Dia-magnetism," he says, " is 
a law of mind to the full extent of Faraday's idea ; 
namely, that every mind has a new compass, a new 
north, a new direction of its own, differing in genius 
and aim from every other mind." In chemistry, in 
botany, in physiology, in geology, in mechanics, he 
found keys to unlock his enigmas. No matter from 
what source the hint came, he was quick to take it. 
The stress and urge of expression with him was very 
great, and he would fuse and recast the most stubborn 
material. There is hardly a fundamental principle of 
science that he has not turned to ideal uses. " The 
law of nature is alternation for evermore. Each 
electrical state superinduces the opposite." " The 
systole and diastole of the heart are not without their 
analogy in the ebb and flow of love," and so on. In 
" Spiritual Laws " he gives a happy turn to the law of 
gravitation : — 

" Let us draw a lesson from nature, which always 
works by short ways. When the fruit is ripe it falls. 
When the fruit is dispatched, the leaf falls. The cir- 
cuit of the waters is mere falling. The walking of 
man and all animals is a falling forward. All our 
manual labor and works of strength, as prying, split- 
ting, digging, rowing, and so forth, are done by dint 
of continual falling, and the globe, earth, moon, 
comet, sun, star, fall for ever and ever." 

He is an evolutionist, not upon actual proof like 
Darwin, but upon poetic insight. " Man," he says, 
" carries the world in his head, the whole astronomy 



74 INDOOR STUDIES. 

and chemistry suspended in a thought. Because the 
history of nature is charactered in his brain, there- 
fore is he the prophet and discoverer of her secrets. 
Every known fact in natural science was divined by 
the presentiment of somebody before it was actually 
verified." Thus that stupendous result of modern 
experimental science, that heat is only a mode of 
motion, was long before (in 1844) a fact in Emer- 
son's idealism. "A little heat, that is a little motion, 
is all that differences the bald, dazzling white and 
deadly poles of the earth from the prolific tropical 
climates. All changes pass without violence, by rea- 
son of the two cardinal conditions of boundless space 
and boundless time. Geology has initiated us into 
the secularity of nature, and taught us to disuse our 
dame-school measure and exchange our Mosaic and 
Ptolemaic schemes for her large style. We knew 
nothing rightly for want of perspective. Now we 
learn what patient periods must round themselves 
before the rock is formed, then before the rock is 
broken, and the first lichen race has disintegrated 
the thinnest external plate into soil, and opened the 
door for the remote flora, fauna, ceres, and pomonas 
to come in. How far off yet is the trilobite ; how 
far the quadruped ! how inconceivably remote is 
man ! All duly arrive, and then race after race of 
men. It is a long way from granite to the oyster ; 
farther yet to Plato and the preaching of the immor- 
tality of the soul. Yet all must come as surely as 
the atom has two sides." 



SCIENCE AND THE POETS. 75 

Indeed most of Emerson's writings, including his 
poems, seem curiously to imply science, as if he had 
all these bold deductions and discoveries under his 
feet, and was determined to match them in the ideal. 
He has taken courage from her revelations. He 
would show another side to nature equally wonderful. 
Such men as Tyndall confess their obligation to him. 
His optics, his electricity, his spectrum analysis, his 
chemical affinity, his perpetual forces, his dynamics, 
his litmus tests, his germs in the air, etc., are more 
wonderful than theirs. How much he makes of cir- 
cles, of polarity, of attraction and repulsion, of nat- 
ural selection, of 

" the famous might that lurks 
In reaction and recoil, 
Makes flame to freeze, and ice to boil." 

He is the astronomer and philosopher of the moral 
sentiment. He is full of the surprises and paradoxes, 
the subtle relations and affinities, the great in the lit- 
tle, the far in the near, the sublime in the mean, that 
science has disclosed in the world about us. He 
would find a more powerful fulminant than has yet 
been discovered. He likes to see two harmless ele- 
ments come together with a concussion that will shake 
the roof. It is not so much for material that Emer- 
son is indebted to science, as for courage, example, 
inspiration. 

When he used scientific material he fertilized it 
with his own spirit. This the true poet will always 



76 INDOOR STUDIES. 

do when he goes to this field. Hard pan will not 
grow corn ; meteoric dust will not nourish melons. The 
poet adds something to the hard facts of science that 
is like vegetable mould to the soil, like the contribu- 
tions of animal and vegetable life, and of the rains, 
the dews, the snows. 

Carlyle's debt to science is much less obvious than 
that of Emerson. He was not the intellectual miser, 
the gleaner and hoarder of ideas for their own sake, 
that Emerson was, but the prophet and spokesman of 
personal qualities, the creator and celebrator of heroes. 
So far as science ignored or belittled man, or the ethi- 
cal quality in man, and rests with a mere mechanical 
conception of the universe, he was its enemy. Indi- 
viduality alone interested him. Not the descent of 
the species, but the ascent of personal attributes, was 
the problem that attracted him. He was unfriendly 
to the doctrine of physical evolution, yet his concep- 
tion of natural selection and the survival of the fittest 
as applied to history is as radical as Darwin's. He 
had studied astronomy to some purpose. The frag- 
ment left among his papers called " Spiritual Optics," 
and published by Froude in his life of him, shows 
what a profound interpretation and application he 
had given to the cardinal astronomical facts. His 
sense of the reign of law, his commanding perception 
of the justice and rectitude inherent in things, of the 
reality of the ideal, of the subordination of the lesser 
to the greater, the tyranny of mass, power, etc., have 
evidently all been deepened and intensified by his 



SCIENCE AND THE POETS. 77 

absorption of the main principles of this department 
of physical science. What disturbed him especially 
was any appearance of chaos, anarchy, insubordina- 
tion ; he wanted to see men governed and duly 
obedient to the stronger force, as if the orbs of 
heaven were his standard. He seemed always to see 
man and human life in their sidereal relations, against 
a background of immensity, depth beyond depth, 
terror beyond terror, splendor above splendor, sur- 
rounding them. Indeed, without the light thrown 
upon the universe by the revelations of astronomy, 
Carlyle would jirobably never have broken from the 
Calvinistic creed of his fathers. By a kind of sure 
instinct he spurned all that phase of science which 
results in such an interpretation of the universe as is 
embodied in the works of Spencer — works which, 
whatever their value, are so utterly barren to the lit- 
erary and artistic mind. 

The inquisitions of science, the vivisections, the 
violent, tortuous, disrupting processes are not always 
profitable. Wherein nature answers the easiest, 
cheerfulest, directest, we find our deepest interest ; 
where science just anticipates the natural sense, as it 
were, or shows itself a little quicker witted than our 
slow faculties, as in the discovery of the circulation 
of the blood for instance. The real wonder is that 
mankind should not always have known and believed 
in the circulation of the blood, because circulation is 
the law of nature. Everything circulates, or finally 
comes back to its starting point. Stagnation is death. 



<8 INDOOR STUDIES. 

The sphericity of the earth, too — how could we 
ever believe anything else ? Does not the whole sys- 
tem of things centre into balls ; every form in nature 
strive to be spherical ? The sphere is the infinity of 
form, that in which all specific form is merged and 
lost, or into which it escapes or gets transformed. 
The doctrine of the correlation and conservation of 
forces is pointed to by the laws of the mind. The 
poets have always said it, and all men have felt it ; 
why await scientific proof ? The spectroscope has 
revealed the universality of chemistry, that the far- 
thermost star, as compared with our earth, is bone 
of her bone and flesh of her flesh. This is a poetic 
truth as well as a scientific, and is. valuable to all 
men, because the germ of it always lay in their 
minds. It is a comfort to know for a certainty that 
these elements are cosmic ; that matter is the same, 
and spirit, or law, the same everywhere, and that if 
we were to visit the remotest worlds, we would not 
find the men rooted to the ground and the trees walk- 
ing about, but life on the same terms as here. The 
main facts of natural history also lie in the main di- 
rection of our natural faculties, and are proper and 
welcome to all men. So much of botany, so much of 
biology, so much of geology, of chemistry, of natural 
philosophy, as lies within the sphere of legitimate 
observation, or within the plane of man's natural 
knowledge, is capable of being absorbed by literature, 
and heightened to new significance. 



MATTHEW ARNOLD'S CRITICISM. 

When Matthew Arnold, during his visit to this 
country in 1883-84 delivered himself upon Emerson 
and Carlyle, he criticised two men who belong to 
quite a different order of mind from his own — men 
who are the prophets of the intuitions and the moral 
sense, as he himself is the apostle of culture and clear 
intelligence. Emerson and Carlyle were essentially 
religious, and were filled with the sentiment of the 
infinite, which M. Renan regards as the chief gift of 
medievalism to the modern world, while Arnold is 
essentially critical, and is filled with the sentiment or 
idea of culture, which is the chief gift to the world 
of Greek civilization. What he had to say of these 
two men I shall consider in another chapter. At 
present I wish to take a general view of Arnold's 
criticism as a whole. 

Probably the need for the urbanity and clear rea- 
son which Arnold brings is just as urgent as the need 
for the moral fervor and conviction which Carlyle 
brings ; if not to us in this country, where the con- 
science of man needs stimulating more than his in- 
tellect needs clearing, then certainly in England, 
where the popular mind is less quick and flexible 
than in America. And, it is against England, 



80 INDOOR STUDIES. 

against British civilization, that the force of Arnold's 
criticism has been directed. 

The application to America of the main drift of 
his criticism of British civilization is lessened not only 
for the reason above hinted at — namely : that the 
race refines and comes into shape in this country 
faster than in Britain, faster, perhaps, than the due 
proportion between character and faculty will warrant ; 
but because class distinctions are practically abolished 
here, and because, in general, there is not the same 
cramped, inflexible, artificial, and congested state of 
things in the United States as cause all the woe of 
England. The defects in our civilization which Ar- 
nold pointed out in a paper printed just before he 
died, namely, that our country, or our doings in it 
are not interesting, that our people are wanting in 
the discipline of awe and reverence, that we are 
given to self-glorification, that our newspapers are 
flippant and sensational, etc., are self-evident to all 
candid observers. "In what concerns the solving 
of the political and social problem they [the people 
of the United States] see clear and think straight ; 
in what concerns the higher civilization they live in 
a fool's paradise." s It seems to me that the last part 
of this sentence is just as true as the first part. From 
the point of view of a good dinner — a point of view 
not to be despised by any means, our country and our 
achievements in it are very interesting, but from a 
high and disinterested point of view, the point of 
view of art and literature, of the best that is known 
and thought in the world, it is not interesting. 



MATTHEW ARNOLD'S CRITICISM. 81 

It could hardly be otherwise. America is the pro- 
duct of the commercial and industrial age, the age of 
prose. Nearly all its features are the outcome of a 
spirit that makes little account of taste, or the beauti- 
ful — the spirit of gain. The spirit that still rules it, 
and rules more or less all modern European nations, 
is the spirit of gain, the greed of wealth, and nothing 
but the ugly, the prosaic can be born of this spirit. 
The old world is the product of quite a different 
spirit, the religious spirit and the spirit of chivalry 
and feudalism. Life seems much riper and fuller 
there — has much more flavor, and one can well see 
how a cultivated European would find America al- 
most intolerable. 

Yet the two principles of which Arnold makes so 
much, Hellenism and Hebraism, the power of ideas 
and the power of conduct, are doubtless more evenly 
blended in our people than among those of Great 
Britain. Indeed, it often appears that if we need 
more of either, it is of the latter rather than of the 
former, a little more of the old Hebrew's reverence 
and depth and solemnity of character, rather than of 
the Hellene's flexibility and desire to hear or to tell 
some new thing. 

The equality also, for which Arnold pleads, we al- 
ready practically have, and the Irish question, the 
Church and the State question, and the burning ques- 
tion, May a man marry his deceased wife's sister ? we 
have not. But the question of culture, of taste, of 
literature, of institutions, of science, of obedience, 



tiZ INDOOR STUDIES. 

and of a just mean and measure in life, we have, and 
shall always have, and may the time be far removed 
when a man who cherishes such lofty ideal upon all 
these subjects as did Matthew Arnold shall not find 
eager and improving listeners among us. Arnold 
meant authority as distinctly as Carlyle did, but the 
authority of the gentler reason, and not of the hero. 

In connecting his name with that of Carlyle, let us 
note here that he stood as much alone in his arraign- 
ment of his countrymen as the great Scotchman did, 
and was as little identified with any party, sect, or 
movement. He was just as fearless and wholesale 
in his criticisms, but far more cool and dispassionate. 
Carlyle can hardly be said to have been a reasonable 
being ; the secret of his influence was not his reason, 
but his genius and religious fervor ; but there is no 
getting away from Arnold's reasonableness (not al- 
ways or commonly a " sweet reasonableness ; " there is 
often a bitter or acrid flavor to it) ; the clearness and 
fullness of his demonstration. Hence he was prob- 
ably more of a thorn in the side of John Bull than 
was Carlyle ; his criticism is harder to answer, and 
he applied it with an air of teasing deference and 
simplicity, or of restrained scorn and contempt, which 
makes it far more irritating than the Scotchman's 
explosions of wrath and picturesque indignation. 
Carlyle is much the greater force, much the more im- 
pressive and stimulating, but he is also much the more 
bewildering and misleading. Arnold has reduced 
the Scotchman's strange mixture of wrath and ten- 



matthew Arnold's criticism. 83 

clerness, poetry and eloquence, prophecy and philoso- 
phy, to a system, and has drawn out of it the pure 
metal available for a sharp and telling criticism. 
Culture and Anarchy, Friendship's Garland, the 
Mixed Essays, the Irish Essays, are hut the Latter- 
day Pamphlets and Past and Present running pure 
and clear. What was like a mountain of mixed ores 
in the latter, becomes weapons of polished steel in 
the former. Take this passage from Past and Pres- 
ent : — 

" Ask Bull his spoken opinion of any matter, — 
oftentimes the force of dullness can no farther go. 
You stand silent, incredulous, as over a platitude that 
borders on the Infinite. The man's Churchisms, Dis- 
senterisms, Puseyisms, Benthamisms, College Philos- 
ophies, Fashionable Literatures, are unexampled in 
this world. Fate's prophecy is fulfilled ; you call 
the man an ox or an ass. But get him once to work, 
— respectable man ! His spoken sense is next to 
nothing, nine tenths of it palpable nonsense ; but his 
unspoken sense, his inner silent feeling of what is 
true, what does agree with fact, what is doable and 
what is not doable, — this seeks its fellow in the world. 
A terrible worker ; irresistible against marshes, moun- 
tains, impediments, disorder, incivilization ; every- 
where vanquishing disorder, leaving it behind him 
as method and order. He ' retires to his bed three 
days,' and considers ! " 

In this passage of strong Carlylese, and in many 
more like it, lies the germ of Arnold's indictment of 



84 INDOOK STUDIES. 

his countrymen, that they lack intelligence, or Geist, 
ability to deal with ideas, and that they are great 
only in deeds, in works, or are Hebraic, rather than 
Hellenic. 

Carlyle himself was terribly given to Hebraizing, 
to praising work, energy, force, and to spurning ideas, 
except when embodied in a man or hero. With him 
the man of theory, or of ideas, cuts a sorry figure 
beside the man of practice or of deeds. 

"How one loves to see the burly figure of him, 
this thick-skinned, seemingly opaque, perhaps sulky, 
almost stupid Man of Practice, pitted against some 
light, adroit Man of Theory, all equipped with clear 
logic, and able everywhere to give you Why for 
Wherefore. The adroit Man of Theory, so light of 
movement, clear of utterance, with his bow full-bent, 
and his quiver full of arrow arguments — surely he 
will strike down the game, transfix everywhere the 
heart of the matter, triumph everywhere, as he 
proves that he shall and must do ? To your aston- 
ishment it turns out oftenest No. The cloudy-browed, 
thick-soled, opaque Practicality, with no logic utter- 
ance, in silence mainly, with here and there a low 
grunt or growl, has in him what transcends all logic 
utterance ; a Congruity with the Unuttered, the 
Speakable, which lies atop, as a superficial film, or 
outer skin, is his or is not his ; but the Doable, which 
reaches down to the world's centre, you find him 
there." 

Here is the voice of Hebraism, strong and trium- 



MATTHEW ARNOLD'S CRITICISM. 85 

phant, as in Arnold we have the voice of Hellenism, 
clear and triumphant. Yet Carlyle was not so much 
on the side of the man of deeds as opposed to the 
man of ideas, as he was on the side of reality as op- 
posed to shams. His mistake probably was too great 
haste in pronouncing all theories shams, and all force 
beneficent. 

The key-note of Arnold's criticism of his country- 
men might also be found in Emerson's " English 
Traits." Emerson charges the English with the same 
want of ideas, and credits them with the same noble 
Hebraizing tendency. The English do not look 
abroad into universality, he said, quoting Bacon. 
Bacon, he said, marked the influx of idealism into 
England. " He had imagination, the leisure of the 
spirit, and basked in an element of contemplation." 
" German science comprehends the English." The 
latter is " void of imagination and free play of 
thought" using the very phrase which Arnold has 
made so telling and significant. Arnold shows his 
genius in the way he seizes upon and expands these 
ideas. What was a casual thought or remark with 
others, in his hands becomes the axis of a great critical 
system. What was wit, or poetry, or a happy char- 
acterization with Carlyle and Emerson, furnishes him 
the start for a most searching and original analysis. 

Arnold was preeminently a critical force, a force of 
clear reason and of steady discernment. He is not 
an author whom we read for the man's sake or for 
the flavor of his personality, for this is not always 



86 INDOOR STUDIES. 

agreeable, but for bis unfailing intelligence and crit- 
ical acumen ; and because, to borrow a sentence of 
Goethe, he helps us to " attain certainty and security 
in the appreciation of things exactly as they are." 
Everywhere in his books we are brought under the 
influence of a mind which indeed does not fill and 
dilate us, but which clears our vision, which sets go- 
ing a process of crystallization in our thoughts, and 
brings our knowledge, on a certain range of subjects, 
to a higher state of clearness and purity. 

Let us admit that he is not a man to build upon ; 
he is in no sense a founder ; he lacks the broad, pa- 
ternal, sympathetic human element that the first order 
of men possess. He lays the emphasis upon the more 
select, high-bred qualities. All his sympathies are 
with the influences which make for correctness, for 
discipline, for taste, for perfection, rather than those 
that favor power, freedom, originality, individuality, 
and the more heroic and primary qualities. 

It is to be owned that there is a quality, a stimulus, 
and helpfulness, which we must not expect of Arnold, 
a power of poetry which his poems, perfect as they 
are, do not afford us, but which we get in much 
greater measure from poets far his inferior in intel- 
ligence and thoroughness of culture, as in a few 
poems of Keats ; a power of prose which his lucid 
sentences do not hold, and a power of criticism which 
his coolness and disinterestedness do not attain to. 
But this latter we must probably go outside of Eng- 
lish literature to find. 



MATTHEW ARNOLD'S CRITICISM. 87 

Arnold was a civilizing and centralizing force. Out 
of the spirit which he begets, and which begat him, 
does not come the great leaders and reformers, the 
one-sided, headstrong, fanatical men, men that serve 
as the plowshare of the destinies to break up the 
stubborn glebe of the world ; but the wise, the cor- 
rect, the urbane, the flexible men, the men who reap 
and enjoy and beautify the world. He says, in effect, 
there are enough insisting upon force, upon genius, 
upon independence, upon rights ; he will lay the stress 
upon culture, and upon duties, and upon those things 
that make for perfection. 

The more vital and active forces of English litera- 
ture of our century have been mainly forces of ex- 
pansion and revolution, or Protestant forces ; our 
most puissant voices have been voices of dissent, and 
have been a stimulus to individuality, separatism, and 
to independence. But here is a voice of another 
order ; a voice closely allied to the best spirit of 
Catholicism ; one from which we will not learn hero- 
worship, or Puritanism, or non-conformity, or catch 
the spark of enthusiasm, or revolution, but from 
which we learn the beauty of urbanity, and the value 
of clear and fresh ideas. 

One never doubts Arnold's ability to estimate a 
purely literary and artistic force, but one sees that it 
is by no means certain that he will fully appreciate 
a force of character, a force of patriotism, of con- 
science, of religion, or any of the more violent rev- 
olutionary forces — that is, apart from a literary rep- 



88 INDOOR STUDIES. 

reservation of them — because his point of view does 
not command these things so completely as it does 
the other. Emerson was a literary force, but above 
and beyond that he was a religious force, a force of 
genius and of good breeding. The dissenters, the 
English Puritans, the French Huguenots, embody a 
force of conscience. Carlyle was a force of Puritan- 
ism, blended with a force antagonistic to it, the force 
of German culture, two forces that did not work well 
together and which gave him no rest. 

Arnold was a literary force of a very high order, 
but was he anything else ? Will he leave any per- 
manent mark upon the conscience, upon the politics, 
upon the thought of his countrymen ? His works, as 
models of urbanity and lucidity, will endure; still 
they do not contain the leaven which leavens and 
modifies races and times. 

The impression that a fragmentary and desultory 
reading of Arnold is apt to give one, namely, that he 
is one of the scorners, a man of " a high look, and a 
proud heart," gradually wears away as one grows 
familiar with the main currents of his teachings. He 
does not indeed turn out to be a large, hearty, mag- 
netic man, but he proves to be a thoroughly serious 
and noble one, whose calmness and elevation are of 
great value. His writings, as now published, in a 
uniform edition, embi^ace ten volumes, to wit: two 
volumes of poems ; two volumes of literary essays, 
" Essays in Criticism " and a volume made up of 
" Celtic Literature " and " On Translating: Homer ; " 



matthew Arnold's criticism. 89 

a volume of mixed essays, mainly on Irish themes'; a 
volume called " Culture and Anarchy " and " Friend- 
ship's Garland," mainly essays in political and social 
criticism ; three volumes of religious criticism, namely, 
" Literature and Dogma," " God and the Bible," and 
" St. Paul and Protestantism " with " Last Essays," 
and one volume of " Discourses in America." Of this 
body of work the eight volumes of prose are pure 
criticism, and by criticism, when applied to Arnold, 
we must mean the scientific passion for pure truth, 
the passion for seeing the thing exactly as it is carried 
into all fields. " I wish to decide nothing as of my 
own authority," he says in one of his earlier essays ; 
" the great art of criticism is to get one's self out of 
the way and to let humanity decide." He would play 
the role of a disinterested observer. Apropos of his 
political and social criticisms, he says : — 

" I do not profess to be a politician, but simply one 
of a disinterested class of observers, who, with no 
organized and embodied set of supporters to please, 
set themselves to observe honestly and to report faith- 
fully the state and prospects of our civilization." 

He urges that criticism in England has been too 
" directly polemical and controversial ; " that it has 
been made to subserve interests not its own ; the 
interest of party, of a sect, of a theory, or of some 
practical and secondary consideration. His own ef- 
fort has been to restore it to its " pure intellectual 
sphere " and to keep its high aim constantly before 
him, " which is to keep man from a self-satisfaction 



90 INDOOR STUDIES. 

which is retarding and vulgarizing ; to lead him to- 
wards perfection, by making his mind dwell upon 
what is excellent in itself, and the absolute beauty 
and fitness of things." 

The spirit in which he approaches Butler's " Anal- 
ogy " is a fair sample of the spirit in which he ap- 
proaches most of his themes : — 

" Elsewhere I have remarked what advantage But- 
ler had against the Deists of his own time, in the 
line of argument which he chose. But how does his 
argument in itself stand the scrutiny of one who has 
no counter-thesis, such as that of the Deists, to make 
good against Butler? How does it affect one who 
has no wish at all to doubt or cavil, like the loose 
wits of fashionable society who angered Butler, still 
less any wish to mock, but who comes to the ' Anal- 
ogy ' with an honest desire to receive from it any- 
thing which he finds he can use ? " 

Matthew Arnold was probably the most deeply im- 
bued with the spirit of Greek culture of any English 
man of letters of our time. It is not that he brings a 
modern mind to classic themes, as has been so often 
done by our poets and essayists, but that he brings a 
classic mind to modern themes, herein differing so 
widely from such a writer, for instance, as Mr. Ad- 
dington Symonds, who has written so much and so 
well upon classic subjects, but in the modern roman- 
tic spirit, rather than with the pure simplicity of the 
antique, — in the spirit whose ruling sense is a sense 
of the measureless, rather than of measure. " Hel- 



matthew Arnold's criticism. 91 

lenic virtue," says Dr. Curtius, the German historian 
of Greece, " consisted in measure ; " " a wise observ- 
ance of right measure in all things." 

Arnold divides the forces that move the world into 
two grand divisions — Hellenism and Hebraism, the 
Greek idea and the Jewish idea, the power of intel- 
lect and the power of conscience. " The uppermost 
idea with Hellenism is to see things as they really 
are ; the uppermost idea with Hebraism is conduct 
and obedience. Nothing can do away with this in- 
effaceable difference. The Greek quarrel with the 
body and its desires is that they hinder right think- 
ing ; the Hebrew quarrel with them is that they hin- 
der right acting." " An unclouded clearness of 
mind, an unimpeded play of thought," is the aim of 
the one ; " strictness of conscience," fidelity to prin- 
ciple, is the mainspring of the other. As, in this 
classification, Carlyle would stand for unmitigated 
Hebraism, so Arnold himself stands for pure Hellen- 
ism ; as the former's Hebraism upon principle was 
backed up by the Hebraic type of mind, its grandeur, 
its stress of conscience, its opulent imagination, its 
cry for judgment and justice, etc., so Arnold's con- 
viction of the superiority of Hellenism as a remedy 
for modern ills is backed up by the Hellenic type of 
mind, its calmness, its lucidity, its sense of form and 
measure. Indeed, Arnold is probably the purest 
classic writer that English literature, as yet, has to 
show ; classic not merely in the repose and purity of 
his style, but in the unity and simplicity of his mind. 



92 INDOOR STUDIES. 

What primarily distinguishes the antique mind from 
the modern mind is its more fundamental singleness 
and wholeness. It is not marked by the same spe- 
cialization and development on particular lines. Our 
highly artificial and complex modern life leads to sep- 
aratism ; to not only a division of labor, but almost 
to a division of man himself. With the ancients, re- 
ligion and politics, literature and science, poetry and 
prophecy, were one. These things had not yet been 
set apart from each other and differentiated. When 
to this we add vital unity and simplicity, the love of 
beauty, and the sense of measure and proportion, we 
have the classic mind of Greece, and the secret of 
the power and charm of those productions which have 
so long ruled supreme in the world of literature and 
art. Arnold's mind has this classic unity and whole- 
ness. With him religion, politics, literature, and sci- 
ence are one, and that one is comprehended under 
the name of culture. Culture means the perfect and 
equal development of man on all sides. 

" Culture," he says, giving vent to his Hellenism, 
" is of like spirit with poetry, follows one law with 
poetry ; " the dominant idea of poetry is " the idea 
of beauty and of a human nature perfect in all its 
sides ; " this idea is the Greek idea. " Human life," 
he says, " in the hands of Hellenism, is invested with 
a kind of aerial ease, clearness, and radiancy ; it is 
full of what we call sweetness and light." " The 
best art and poetry of the Greeks," he says, " in 
which religion and poetry are one, in which the idea 



MATTHEW ARNOLD'S CRITICISM. 93 

of beauty and of human nature perfect on all sides 
adds to itself a religious and devout energy, and works 
in the strength of that, is on this account of such sur- 
passing interest and instructiveness for us." But 
Greece failed because the moral and religious fibre 
in humanity was not braced and developed also. 

" But Greece did not err in having the idea of 
beauty, harmony, and complete human perfection so 
present and paramount. It is impossible to have this 
idea too present and paramount ; only, the moral fibre 
must be braced too. And we, because we have 
braced the moral fibre, are not on that account in 
the right way, if at the same time the idea of beauty, 
harmony, and complete human perfection is wanting 
or misapprehended amongst us ; and evidently it is 
wanting or misapprehended at present. And when 
we rely, as we do, on our religious organizations, 
which in themselves do not and can not give us this 
idea, and think we have done enough if we make 
them spread and prevail, then I say we fall into our 
common fault of overvaluing machinery." 

From the point of view of Greek culture, and the 
ideal of Greek life, there is perhaps very little in the 
achievements of the English race, or in the ideals 
which it cherishes, that would not be pronounced the 
work of barbarians. From the Apollinarian stand- 
point, Christianity itself, with its war upon our natu- 
ral instincts, is a barbarous religion. But no born 
Hellene from the age of Pericles could pronounce a 
severer judgment upon the England of to-day than 



94 INDOOR STUDIES. 

Arnold has in his famous classification of his coun- 
trymen into Barbarians, Phillistines, and Populace, 
an upper class materialized, a middle class vulgarized, 
and a lower class brutalized. Arnold had not the 
Hellenic joyousness, youthfulness, and spontaneity. 
His is a " sad lucidity of soul," whereas the Greek 
had a joyous lucidity of soul. " Solon, Solon ! " 
said the priest of Egypt, " you Greeks are always 
children." But the Englishman had the Greek pas- 
sion for symmetry, totality, and the Hellenic abhor- 
rence of the strained, the fantastic, the obscure. His 
were not merely the classical taste and predilections 
of a scholar, but of an alert, fearless, and thorough- 
going critic of life ; a man who dare lay his hands on 
the British constitution itself and declare that " with 
its compromises, its love of facts, its horror of theory, 
its studied avoidance of clear thought, it sometimes 
looks a colossal machine, for the manufacture of Phil- 
istines." Milton was swayed by the Greek ideals in 
his poetry, but they took no vital hold of his life ; his 
Puritanism and his temper in his controversial writ- 
ings are the farthest possible remove from the seren- 
ity and equipoise of the classic standards. But Ar- 
nold, a much less poetic force certainly than Milton, 
was animated by the spirit of Hellenism on all occa- 
sions ; it was the shaping and inspiring spirit of his 
life. It was not a dictum with him, but a force. Yet 
his books are thoroughly of to-day, thoroughly occu- 
pied with current men and measures, and covered 
with current names and allusions. 



MATTHEW ARNOLD'S CRITICISM. 95 

Arnold's Hellenism speaks very pointedly all 
through " Culture and Anarchy," in all those assaults 
of his upon the " hideousness and rawness " of so 
much of British civilization, upon the fierceness and 
narrowness, the Jacobinism of parties, upon " the 
Dissidence of Dissent, and the Protestantism of the 
Protestant religion ; " in his efforts to divest the 
mind of all that is harsh, uncouth, impenetrable, ex- 
clusive, self-willed, one-sided ; in his efforts to render 
it more flexible, tolerant, free, lucid, with less faith 
in individuals and more faith in principles. They 
speak in him when he calls Luther a Philistine of 
genius ; when he says of the mass of his countrymen 
that they have " a defective type of religion, a narrow 
range of intellect and knowledge, a stunted sense of 
beauty, a low standard of manner ; " that " Puritan- 
ism was a prison which the English people entered 
and had the key turned upon its spirit there for two 
hundred years ; " when he tells the dissenters that in 
preferring their religious service to that of the estab- 
lished church they have shown a want of taste and 
of culture like that of preferring Eliza Cook to Mil- 
ton. " A public rite with a reading of Milton at- 
tached to it is another thing from a public rite with a 
reading from Eliza Cook." 

His ideas of poetry as expressed in the preface to 
his poems in 1853 are distinctly Greek, and they led 
him to exclude from the collection his long poem 
called " Empedocles on Etna," because the poem was 
deficient in the classic requirements of action. He 
says : — 



96 INDOOR STUDIES. 

" The radical difference between the poetic theory 
of the Greeks and our own is this : that with them 
the poetical character of the action in itself, and the 
conduct of it, was the first consideration ; with us at- 
tention is fixed mainly on the value of the separate 
thoughts and images which occur in the treatment of 
an action. They regarded the whole ; we regard the 
parts. "We have poems which seem to exist merely 
for the sake of single lines and passages, not for the 
sake of producing any total impression. We have 
critics who seem to direct their attention merely to 
detached expressions, to the language about the action, 
not to the action itself. I verily think that the major- 
ity of them do not in their hearts believe that there 
is such a thing as a total impression to be derived from 
a poem at all, or to be demanded from a poet ; they 
think the term a commonplace of metaphysical criti- 
cism. They will permit the poet to select any action 
he pleases, and to suffer that action to go as it will, 
provided he gratifies them with occasional bursts of 
fine writing, and with a shower of isolated thoughts 
and images. That is, they permit him to leave their 
poetical sense ungratified, provided that he gratifies 
their rhetorical sense and their curiosity." 

Here we undoubtedly have the law as deducible 
from the Greek poets, and perhaps as deducible from 
the principles of perfect taste itself. Little wonder 
Arnold found Emerson's poems so unsatisfactory, — 
Emerson, the most unclassical of poets, with no 
proper sense of wholeness at all, no continuity, no 



matthew Arnold's criticism. 97 

power to deal with actions. Emerson has great pro- 
jectile power, but no constructive power. His aim 
was mainly to shoot a thought or an image on a line 
like a meteor athwart the imagination of his reader, 
to kindle and quicken his feeling for beautiful and 
sublime truths. Valuable as these things are, it is to 
be admitted that those poems that are concrete 
wholes, like the organic products of nature, will al- 
ways rank the higher with a pure artistic taste. 

Whatever be our opinion of the value of his criti- 
cism, we must certainly credit Arnold with a steady 
and sincere effort to see things whole, to grasp the 
totality of life, all the parts duly subordinated and 
brought into harmony with one another. His watch- 
word on all occasions is totality, or perfection. He 
has shown us the shortcomings of Puritanism, of Lib- 
eralism, and of all forms of religious dissent, when 
tried by the spirit of Hellenism. We have been 
made to see very clearly wherein John Bull is not a 
Greek, and we can divine the grounds of his irrita- 
tion by the comparison. It is because the critic could 
look in the face of his great achievement in the world 
and blame him for being John Bull. The concession 
that after all he at times in his history exhibited the 
grand style, the style of the Homeric poems, was a 
compliment he did not appreciate. 

" English civilization, — the humanizing, the bring- 
ing into one harmonious and truly human life of the 
whole body of English society, — that is what inter- 
ests me. I try to be a disinterested observer of all 
which really helps and hinders that." 



98 INDOOR STUDIES. 

He recognizes four principal needs in the life of 
every people and community, — the need of conduct, 
the need of beauty, the need of knowledge, and the 
need of social life and manners. The English have 
the sense of the power of conduct, the Italians the 
sense of the power of beauty, the Germans the sense 
of the power of knowledge or science, the French the 
sense of the power of social life and manners. All 
these things are needed for our complete humaniza- 
tion or civilization ; the ancient Greeks came nearer 
possessing the whole of them, and of moving on all 
these lines, than any other people. The ground of 
his preference for the historic churches, the Catholic 
and the Anglican, over the dissenting churches is 
that, while they all have a false philosophy of reli- 
gion, the former address themselves to more needs of 
human life than the latter. 

" The need for beauty is a real and now rapidly 
growing need in man ; Puritanism cannot satisfy it ; 
Catholicism and the English Church can. The need 
for intellect and knowledge in him, indeed, neither 
Puritanism, nor Catholicism, nor the English Church 
can at present satisfy. That need has to seek satis- 
faction nowadays elsewhere, — through the modern 
spirit, science, literature." 

He avers that Protestantism has no intellectual 
superiority over Catholicism, but only a moral superi- 
ority arising from greater seriousness and earnest- 
ness. Neither have the Greek wholeness and pro- 
portion. The attitude of the one towards the Bible 



MATTHEW ARNOLD'S CRITICISM. 99 

is as unreasoning as the attitude of the other towards 
the church. 

" The mental habit of him who imagines that Ba- 
laam's ass spoke, in no respect differs from the men- 
tal habit of him who imagines that a Madonna, of 
wood or stone, winked." 

The most that can be claimed for each sect, each 
church, each party is that it is free from some special 
bondage which still confines the mind of some other 
sect or party. Those, indeed, are free whom the 
truth makes free ; but each sect and church has only 
a fragment of the truth, a little here and a little 
there. Both Catholic and Protestant have the germ 
of religion, and both have a false philosophy of the 
germ. 

" But Catholicism has the germ invested in an im- 
mense poetry, the gradual work of time and nature, 
and of the great impersonal artist, Catholic Christen- 
dom." 

The unity or identity of literature and religion, as 
with the Greeks — this is the animating idea of " Lit- 
erature and Dogma." In this work Arnold brings 
his Hellenism to bear upon the popular religion and 
the dogmatic interpretation of the Bible, upon which 
the churches rest ; and the result is that we get from 
him a literary interpretation of the Bible, a free and 
plastic interpretation, as distinguished from the hard, 
literal, and historical interpretation. He reads the 
Bible as literature, and not as history or science. 
He seeks its verification in an appeal to taste, to the 



100 INDOOR STUDIES. 

simple reason, to the fitness of things. He finds that 
the Biblical writers used words in a large and free 
way, in a fluid and literary way, and not at all with 
the exactness and stringency of science or mathema- 
tics; or, as Sir Thomas Browne said of his own 
works, that many things are to be taken in a " soft 
and flexible sense." 

In other words, the aim of Arnold's religious criti- 
cism is to rescue what he calls the natural truth of 
Christianity from the discredit and downfall which 
he thinks he sees overtaking its unnatural truth, its 
reliance upon miracles and the supernatural. The 
ground, he says, is slipping from under these things ; 
the time spirit is against them, and unless something 
is done the very heart and core of Christianity itself, 
as found in the teachings of Christ, will be lost to the 
mass of mankind. Upon this phase of Arnold's crit- 
icism I have this to remark : it is difficult to see how 
Christianity, as a people's religion, can be preserved 
by its natural or verifiable truth alone. This natural 
truth the world has always had ; it bears the same 
relation to Christianity that the primary and mineral 
elements bear to a living organism ; what is distinc- 
tive and valuable in Christianity is the incarnation of 
these truths in a living system of beliefs and observ- 
ances which not only take hold of men's minds but 
which move their hearts. 

We may extract the natural truth of Christianity, 
a system of morality or of ethics, and to certain 
minds this is enough ; but it is no more Christianity 



Matthew Arnold's criticism. 101 

than the extract of lilies or roses is a flower-garden. 
" Religion," Arnold well says, " is morality touched 
with emotion." It is just this element of emotion 
which we should lose if we reduced Christianity to its 
natural truths. Show a man the natural or scientific 
truth of answer to prayer, that is, that answer to 
prayer is a purely subjective phenomenon, and his 
lips are sealed ; teach him the natural truth of salva- 
tion by Jesus Christ, namely, that self-renunciation, 
that love, that meekness, that dying for others, is sav- 
ing, and the emotion evaporates from his religion. 

It is, he says, the natural truth of Christianity 
that he is after ; but it is not the natural truth that 
the world wants ; it is not this that has saved men 
and that still saves them, that is, holds them up to the 
standard of their better selves and sustains them in a 
life of solitude and virtue. It is the legendary or ar- 
tificial truth of Christianity which does this, that which 
the human heart, in its fear, its faith, its hope, its cre- 
dulity, or in all combined, supplies. It is what Arnold 
calls extra-belief or aberglaube, the part he is trying 
to get rid of, that makes Christianity a power for good 
over the mass of mankind. Aberglaube, Goethe said, 
is the poetry of life, and it is just this superadded ele- 
ment to Christianity that to the mass of mankind give 
it charm, its attraction, its truth to their hearts and 
imaginations. It is this that touches the natural 
truth of Christianity with emotion and makes it fruit- 
ful. It is true that this Aberglaube or superstition is 
not science, though it perpetually imagines itself to be 



102 INDOOR STUDIES. 

so, but it is nevertheless real to the hearts and faiths 
of men. To show them that it is not real, that it is 
not science, is to strip the tree of its leaves ; the tree 
will perish ; the natural truth of Christianity will not 
save it to the masses. They can do nothing with the 
natural truth ; the fairy tale, the exfra-belief, or the 
superstition, whatever you please to call it, must be 
added. Arnold himself says : " That the spirit of 
man should entertain hopes and anticipations, beyond 
what it actually knows and can verify, is quite nat- 
ural." Yes, and beyond what is actually true. " Hu- 
man life could not have the scope, and depth, and 
progress it has were this otherwise." 

The reader's mind does not pass readily from Ar- 
nold's disbelief in what is called revealed religion 
to his advocacy of any church or form of worship : 
from his scientific passion, his effort to see things ex- 
actly as they are, to his defense of empty and un- 
meaning forms. There is a break here, a fault in his 
mind. There is no logical connection between his at- 
titude in reference to the interpretation of the Bible, 
and his advocacy of a form of religious worship 
upheld by the state. 

If we give up the dogma we must give up the rite 
founded upon the dogma. Our churches must be- 
come halls of science or temples of art. Can we 
worship an impersonal law or tendency? If public 
worship is to be continued, if church organization is 
still to go on, as Mr. Arnold advocates, it is impossi- 
ble to see how the natural truth of Christianity will 



MATTHEW ARNOLD'S CRITICISM. 103 

alone suffice. The truths of the Bible differ from the 
truths of science just as a picture or a parable differs 
from an exact statement, not that they are any more 
true, but that they are true in a way that makes 
them take a deeper hold upon the spirit. Science 
knows as clearly as religion that " the face of the 
Lord is against them that do evil," but does it know 
it in just the intimate and personal way ? it knows it 
only as it knows the truth of one of Kepler's laws by 
a process of cool ratiocination ; but religion knows it 
through an emotional process, into which the personal 
element of love and fear enter. I am not discussing 
the superiority of one mode of belief over the other ; 
I only urge that worship has its rise in the latter 
and not in the former. Reason is not the basis of a 
national religion and never has been. It is very 
doubtful if the disclosure of a scientific basis for the 
truths of religion would not be a positive drawback 
to the religious efficacy of those truths ; because this 
view of them would come in time to supplant and 
to kill the personal emotional view, which worship re- 
quires. 

It is therefore considered as religion, as the basis 
of public worship, that Arnold does injustice to the 
popular faith. As science, or philosophy, what he has 
to offer may be much more acceptable to certain ad- 
vanced minds, but to the race as a whole a sublimated 
extract of Christianity can never take the place of 
the old palpable concrete forms. In fact, getting at 
the natural truths of a people's religion is very much 



104 INDOOR STUDIES. 

like burning their temples and their idols, and offer- 
ing them the ashes. 

Another form which Arnold's Hellenism takes is 
that it begets in him what we may call the spirit of 
institutionalism, as opposed to the spirit of individual- 
ism. Greek culture centres in institutions, and the 
high character of their literary and artistic produc- 
tions was the expression of qualities which did not 
merely belong to individuals here and there, but were 
current in the nation as a whole. With the Greek 
the state was supreme. He lived and died for the 
state. He had no private, separate life and occupa- 
tion, as has the modern man. The arts, architecture, 
sculpture, existed mainly for public uses. There was 
probably no domestic life, no country life, no individ- 
ual enterprises, as we know them. The individual 
was subordinated. Their greatest men were banished 
or poisoned from a sort of jealousy of the state. 
The state could not endure such rivals. Their games, 
their pastimes, were national institutions. Public sen- 
timent on all matters was clear and strong. There 
was a common standard, an unwritten law of taste, 
to which poets, artists, orators, appealed. Not till 
Athens began to decay did great men appear, who, 
like Socrates, had no influence in the state. This 
spirit of institutionalism is strong in Matthew Ar- 
nold ; and it is not merely an idea which he has 
picked up from the Greek, but is the inevitable out- 
cropping of his inborn Hellenism. This alone places 






matthew Arnold's criticism. 105 

him in opposition to his countrymen, who are sus- 
picious of the state and of state action, and who give 
full swing to the spirit of individualism. It even 
places him in hostility to Protestantism, or to the 
spirit which begat it, to say nothing of the dissenting 
churches. It makes him indifferent to the element 
of personalism, the flavor of character, the quality of 
unique individual genius, wherever found in art, lit- 
erature, or religion. It is one secret of his prefer- 
ence of the establishment over the dissenting churches. 
The dissenter stands for personal religion, religion as 
a private and individual experience ; the established 
churches stand for institutional religion, or religion 
as a public and organized system of worship ; and 
when the issue is between the two, Arnold will al- 
ways be found on the side of institutionalism. He 
always takes up for the state against the individual, 
for public and established forms against private and 
personal dissent and caprice. " It was by no means 
in accordance with the nature of the Hellenes," says 
Dr. Curtius, " mentally to separate and view in the 
light of contrast such institutions as the state and 
religion, which in reality, everywhere most intimately 
pervaded one another." 

What Arnold found to approve in this country was 
our institutions, our success in solving the social and 
political problems, and what he found to criticise was 
our excessive individualism, our self-glorification, the 
bad manners of our newspapers, and, in general, the 
crude state of our civilization. 



106 INDOOR STUDIES. 

One would expect Arnold to prefer the religion of 
the Old Testament to that of the New, for, as he him- 
self says : " The leaning, there, is to make religion 
social rather than personal, an affair of outward du- 
ties rather than of inward dispositions ; " and, to a 
disinterested observer, this is very much like what 
the religion of the Anglican Church appears to be. 

Arnold always distrusts the individual ; he sees in 
him mainly a bundle of whims and caprices. The 
individual is one-sided, fantastical, headstrong, nar- 
row. He distrusts all individual enterprises in the 
way of schools, colleges, churches, charities ; and, like 
his teacher, Aristotle, pleads for state action in all 
these matters. '' Culture," he says (and by culture 
he means Hellenism), " will not let us rivet our atten- 
tion upon any one man and his doings ; " it directs 
our attention rather to the " natural current there is 
in human affairs," and assigns " to systems and to 
system makers a smaller share in the bent of human 
destiny than their friends like." 

" I remember, when I was under the influence of a 
mind to which I feel the greatest obligations, the mind 
of a man who was the very incarnation of sanity and 
clear sense, a man the most considerable, it seems to 
me, whom America has yet produced, — Benjamin 
Franklin, — I remember the relief with which, after 
long feeling the sway of Franklin's imperturbable 
common sense, I came upon a pi'oject of his for a new 
version of the Book of Job, to replace the old ver- 
sion, the style of which, says Franklin, has become 



MATTHEW ARNOLD'S CRITICISM. 107 

obsolete, and hence less agreeable. ' I give,' he con- 
tinues, ' a few verses, which may serve as a sample 
of the kind of version I would recommend/ 1 We 
all recollect the famous verse in our translation : 
' Then Satan answered the Lord, and said, Doth Job 
fear God for nought ? ' Franklin makes this : ' Does 
your Majesty imagine that Job's good conduct is the 
effect of mere personal attachment and affection ? ' 
I well remember, how, when first I read that, I drew 
a deep breath of relief, and said to myself : ' After 
all, there is a stretch of humanity beyond Franklin's 
victorious good sense ! ' So, after hearing Bentham 
cried loudly up as the renovator of modern society, 
and Bentham's mind and ideas proposed as the rulers 
of our future, I open the ' Deontology.' There I 
read : ' While Xenophon was writing his history and 
Euclid teaching geometry, Socrates and Plato were 
talking nonsense under pretense of talking wisdom 
and morality. This morality of theirs consisted in 
words ; this wisdom of theirs was the denial of mat- 
ters known to every man's experience.' From the 
moment of reading that, I am delivered from the 
bondage of Bentham ! the fanaticism of his adher- 
ents can touch me no longer. I feel the inadequacy 
of his mind and ideas for supplying the rule of human 
society, for perfection." 

The modern movement seems to me peculiarly a 
movement of individualism, a movement favoring the 

1 It turns out that this was only a joke of Franklin's, audit 
is very curious that Arnold did not see it. 



108 INDOOR STUDIES. 

greater freedom and growth of the individual, as op- 
posed to outward authority and its lodgment in insti- 
tutions. It is this movement which has given a dis- 
tinctive character to the literature of our century, a 
movement in letters which Goethe did more to for- 
ward than any other man — Goethe, who said that 
in art and poetry personal genius is everything, and 
that " in the great work the great person is always 
present as the great factor." Arnold seems not to 
share this feeling ; he does not belong to this move- 
ment. His books give currency to another order of 
ideas. He subordinates the individual, and lays the 
emphasis on culture and the claims of the higher 
standards. He says the individual has no natural 
rights, but only duties. We never find him insisting 
upon originality, self-reliance, character, independ- 
ence, but, quite the contrary, on conformity and obe- 
dience. He says that at the bottom of the trouble of 
all the English people lies the notion of its being the 
prime right and happiness for each of us to affirm 
himself and to be doing as he likes. One of his ear- 
liest and most effective essays was to show the value 
of academies, of a central and authoritative standard 
of taste to a national literature ; and in all his subse- 
quent writings the academic note has been struck and 
adhered to. With him right reason and the author- 
ity of the state are one. " In our eyes," he says, 
" the very framework and exterior order of the state, 
whoever may administer the state, is sacred." " Ev- 
ery one of us," he again says, " has the idea of coun- 



matthew Arnold's criticism. 109 

try, as a sentiment ; hardly any one of us has the 
idea of the state, as a working power. And why ? 
Because we habitually live in our ordinary selves, 
which do not carry us beyond the ideas and wishes of 
the class to which we happen to belong." Which is 
but saying because we are wrapped so closely about 
by our individualism. His remedy for the democratic 
tendencies of the times, tendencies he does not re- 
gret, is an increase of the dignity and authority of 
the state. The danger of English democracy is, he 
says, " that it will have far too much its own way, 
and be left far too much to itself." He adds, with 
great force and justness, that " nations are not truly 
great solely because the individuals composing them 
are numerous, free, and active, but they are great 
when these numbers, this freedom, and this activity 
are employed in the service of an ideal higher than 
that of an ordinary man, taken by himself." Or, as 
Aristotle says, these things must be in " obedience to 
some intelligent principle, and some right regulation, 
which has the power of enforcing its decrees." 

When the licensed victualers or the commercial 
travelers propose to make a school for their children, 
Arnold is unsparing in his ridicule. He says that to 
bring children up " in a kind of odor of licensed vic- 
tualism or of bagmanism is not a wise training to 
give to children." The heads and representatives of 
the nation should teach them better, but they do noth- 
ing of the kind ; on the contrary, they extol the en- 
ergy and self-reliance of the licensed victualers or 



110 INDOOR STUDIES. 

commercial travelers, and predict fall success for their 
schools. John Bull is suspicious of centralization, 
bureaucracy, state authority, which carry things with 
such a high hand on the Continent. Anything that 
threatens, or seems to threaten, his individual liberty, 
he stands clear of. The sense of the nation spoke in 
the words lately uttered through the " Times " by Sir 
Auberon Herbert. He says : — 

" All great state systems stupefy ; you cannot make 
the state a parent without the logical consequence of 
making the people children. Official regulation and 
free mental perception of what is right and wise do 
not and cannot coexist. I see no possible way in 
which you can reconcile these great state services and 
the conditions under which men have to make true 
progress in themselves." 

But to preach such notions in England, Arnold 
would say, is like carrying coals to Newcastle. They 
would be of more service in France, where state ac- 
tion is excessive. In England the dangers are the 
other way. 

" Our dangers are in exaggerating the blessings of 
self-will and of self - assertion ; in not being ready 
enough to sink our imperfectly formed self-will in 
view of a large general result." 

There seems to be nothing in Hellenism that sug- 
gests Catholicism, and yet evidently it is Arnold's 
classical feeling for institutions that gives him his 
marked Catholic bias. The Catholic Church is a 
great institution, the greatest and oldest in the world. 



MATTHEW ARNOLD'S CRITICISM. Ill 

It makes and always has made short work of the in- 
dividual. It is cold, stately, impersonal. Says Emer- 
son : — 

" In the long time it has blended with everything 
in heaven above and the earth beneath. It moves 
through a zodiac of feasts and fasts, names every day 
of the year, every town and market and headland 
and monument, and has coupled itself with the al- 
manac, that no court can be held, no field plowed, no 
horse shod, without some leave from the church." 

It appeals to Arnold by reason of these things, and 
it appeals to him by reason of its great names, its 
poets, artists, statesmen, preachers, scholars ; its im- 
posing ritual, its splendid architecture, its culture. 
It has been the conserver of letters. For centuries 
the priests were the only scholars, and its ceremonial 
is a kind of petrified literature. Arnold clearly 
speaks for himself, or from his own bias, when he 
says that " the man of imagination, nay, and the phil- 
osopher too, in spite of her propensity to burn him, 
will always have a weakness for the Catholic Church ; " 
"it is because of the rich treasures of human life 
which have been stored within her pale." Indeed, 
there is a distinct flavor of Catholicism about nearly 
all of Matthew Arnold's writings. One cannot al- 
ways put his finger on it ; it is in the air, it is in that 
cool, haughty impersonalism, that ex cathedra tone, 
that contempt for dissenters, that genius for form, 
that spirit of organization. His mental tone and 
temper ally him to Cardinal Newman, who seems to 



112 INDOOR STUDIES. 

have exerted a marked influence upon him, and who 
is still, he says, a great name to the imagination. 
Yet he says Newman " has adopted, for the doubts 
and difficulties which beset men's minds to-day, a 
solution, which, to speak frankly, is impossible." 
What, therefore, repels Arnold in Catholicism, and 
keeps him without its fold, is its " ultramontanism, 
sacerdotalism, and superstition." Its cast-iron dog- 
mas and its bigotry are too much for his Hellenic 
spirit ; but no more so than are the dogmas and big- 
otry of the Protestant churches. It is clear enough 
that he would sooner be a Catholic than a Presbyte- 
rian or a Methodist. 

The real superiority of the Catholic Church, he 
says, is in " its charm for the imagination — its 
poetry. I persist in thinking that Catholicism has, 
from this superiority, a great future before it ; that it 
will endure while all the Protestant sects (in which I 
do not include the Church of England) dissolve and 
pei'ish. I persist in thinking that the prevailing form 
for the Christianity of the future will be the form of 
Catholicism ; but a Catholicism purged, opening itself 
to the light and air, having the consciousness of its 
own poetry, freed from its sacerdotal despotism, and 
freed from its pseudo-scientific apparatus of super- 
annuated dogma. Its forms will be retained, as sym- 
bolizing with the force and charm of poetry a few 
cardinal facts and ideas simple indeed, but indispen- 
sable and inexhaustible, and on which our race could 
lay hold only by materializing them." 



matthew Arnold's criticism. 113 

All this may well be questioned. To the disinter- 
ested, observer, the ritual and the imposing ceremonial 
of the Catholic Church has about it little of the char- 
acter of true poetry, or of true beauty. These things 
appeal to a low order of imagination and mentality, 
and are one secret of the church's influence over the 
vulgar masses. A man of true taste is no more 
touched by them than by any rite of pagan faiths. 
True, the great cathedrals are a part of the ceremo- 
nial of the church, and here the height of true poetry 
is reached, and the imagination is aroused, as it is 
also by her great names, her poets, artists, scholars, 
preachers, of the Middle Ages. But the secret of all 
these things has now passed from the Catholic 
Church. She is as impotent in art and architecture, 
in literature and in the pulpit, as are the Protestant 
churches. Raphaels, and Dantes, and Fenelons, and 
Pascals, and Bossuets no longer appear within her 
pale. Should we not rather look for the real supe- 
riority of the Catholic Cburch, as an active force in 
the world, to its authority, its vast overshadowing 
power as an institution ? In this respect it is nearly 
perfect, and does indeed touch the imagination. It 
is as thorough as nature, as searching as fate. It 
lays its hands upon every force of human life. It is 
wonderfully adapted to the weakness, the ignorance, 
and the helplessness of mankind. It establishes the 
ways, it prescribes your belief, it settles doubts and 
misgivings. Dr. Johnson said he could easily see 
how many good but timid and credulous persons 



114 INDOOR STUDIES. 

" might be glad to be of a church where there are so 
many helps to get to heaven ; " and he adds of him- 
self, " I would be a Papist if I could ; I have fear 
enough, but an obstinate rationality prevents me." 
It is, indeed, easy to get to heaven by way of the 
Catholic Church. 

It is as complete as Noah's Ark in which such 
a motley crew found lodgment. The inmates are 
housed from the winds, the waves, the storms. Prot- 
estantism has taken to the open boats, while some of 
the sects have hardly a plank beneath them. Yes, if 
you are no swimmer, and must needs make the voy- 
age with the least possible trouble and exposure, em- 
bark in the great mother church. You have little 
more to do than a passenger on board of one of the 
Atlantic steamers. Herein we strike the secret of 
the power of the Catholic Church, and the secret of 
its hopes for the future. After one has passed 
through a certain course of experience and develop- 
ment, it is easy to see how men tire of the open boat, 
or single plank, mode of navigation, and desire the 
repose and security of a vessel that has withstood the 
elements so long. Then people left to themselves 
do make such wretched work with the Bible, do be- 
little and vulgarize it so. They take a text here and 
a text there, and brood over them, and make a great 
noise over a nest full of addled eggs ; for a text, 
wrenched from its context and read in any spirit but 
that in which it was written, becomes as an addled 
egg. Mormonism is one of the legitimate fruits of 



matthew Arnold's criticism. 115 

Protestantism. The Catholic Church puts an end to 
all this ; there are no more noisy sects and isms ; the 
Bible is authoritatively interpreted. This alone com- 
mends her to men of taste. 

Arnold's Hellenism is the source of both bis weak- 
ness and his strength ; his strength, because it gives 
him a principle tbat cannot be impeached. In all 
matters of taste and culture the Greek standards are 
the last and highest court of appeal. In no other 
race and time has life been so rounded and full and 
invested with the same charm. " They were freer 
than other mortal races," says Professor Curtius, 
" from all that hinders and oppresses the motions of 
the mind." 

It is the source of his weakness, or ineffectualness, 
because he has to do with an unclassical age and 
unclassical people. It is interesting and salutary to 
have the Greek standards applied to modern politics 
and religion, and to the modern man, but the appli- 
cation makes little or no impression save on the lit- 
erary classes. "Well may Arnold have said, in his 
speech at The Authors' Club in New York, that only 
the literary class had understood and sustained him. 
The other classes have simply been irritated or be- 
wildered by him. His tests do not appeal to them. 
The standards which the philosopher, or the political 
economist, or the religious teacher brings, impress 
them more. 

The Greek flexibility of intellect cannot be too 



116 INDOOR STUDIES. 

much admired, but the Greek flexibility of character 
and conscience is quite another thing. Of the an- 
cient Hellenes it may with truth be said that they 
were the " wisest, brightest, meanest of mankind." 
Such fickleness, treachery, duplicity, were perhaps 
never before wedded to such aesthetic rectitude and 
wholeness. They would bribe their very gods. Such 
a type of character can never take deep hold of the 
British mind. 

When Arnold, reciting the episode of Wragg, tells 
his countrymen that " by the Ilissus there was no 
Wragg, poor thing," will his countrymen much con- 
cern themselves whether there was or not? When 
the burden of his indictment of the English Liberals 
is that they have worked only for political expan- 
sion, and have done little or nothing for the need of 
beauty, the need of social life and manners, and the 
need of intellect and knowledge, will the English 
Liberals feel convicted by the charge? When he 
says of the Pilgrim fathers that Shakespeare and 
Virgil would have found their company intolerable, 
is Puritanism discredited in the eye of English Pur- 
itans ? Indeed, literary standards, applied to politics 
or religion, are apt to be ineffectual with all except a 
very limited circle of artistic spirits. 

Whether it be a matter for regret or for congratu- 
lation, there can be little doubt that man and all his 
faculties are becoming more and more specialized, 
more and more differentiated ; the quality of unique 
individual genius is more and more valued, so that 



MATTHEW ARNOLD'S CRITICISM. 117 

we are wandering farther and farther from the unity, 
the simplicity, and the repose of the antique world. 

This fact may afford the best of reasons for the 
appearance of such a man as Arnold, who opposes 
so squarely and fairly this tendency, and who draws 
such fresh courage and strength from the classic 
standards. But it accounts in a measure for the 
general expression of distaste with which his teach- 
ings have been received. Still, he has shown us very 
clearly how British civilization looks to Hellenic 
eyes, where it needs pruning and where it needs 
strengthening ; and he has doubtless set going cur- 
rents of ideas that must eventually tell deeply upon 
the minds of his countrymen. 

It is undoubtedly as a critic of literature that 
Arnold is destined to leave his deepest mark. In 
this field the classic purity and simplicity of his mind, 
its extraordinary clearness, steadiness, and vitality 
are the qualities most prized. His power as a critic 
is undoubtedly his power of definition and classifica- 
tion, a gift he has which allies him with the great 
naturalists and classifiers. Probably no other Eng- 
lish critic has thrown into literature so many phrases 
and definitions that are likely to become a permanent 
addition to the armory of criticism as has Arnold. 
Directness and definiteness are as proper and as easy 
to him as to a Greek architect. He is the least be- 
wildering of writers. With what admirable skill he 
brings out his point on all occasions ! Things fall 
away from it till it stands out like a tree in a field, 



118 INDOOR STUDIES. 

which we see all around. His genius for definition 
and analysis finds full scope in his works on " Celtic 
Literature," wherein are combined the strictness of 
scientific analysis with the finest literary charm. The 
lectures, too, on " Translating Homer," seem as con- 
clusive as a scientific demonstration. 

A good sample of his power to pluck out the heart 
of the secret of a man's influence may be found in 
his essay on Wordsworth. 

" Wordsworth's poetry is great because of the ex- 
traordinary power with which Wordsworth feels the 
joy offered to us in nature, the joy offered to us in 
simple elementary affections and duties, and because 
of the extraordinary power with which, in case after 
case, he shows us this joy and renders it so as to 
make us share it." 

Arnold has been compared to Sainte-Beuve, but 
the resemblance is not very striking. Arnold has not 
the vivacity of mind of the Frenchman, nor the same 
power to efface himself and his opinions. It is not 
an easy matter for an Englishman to efface himself 
on any occasion. Sainte-Beuve is the better instru- 
ment, but Arnold is the greater force. 

In power of concentration and in power of defini- 
tion, the English critic surpasses his French master. 
Sainte-Beuve's power is a power of interpretation ; 
he can adjust himself more closely and happily to a 
wide diversity of minds than can Arnold. He was 
not a critic of opinions, doctrines, teachings, but an 
interpreter of genius in all its forms. No matter 



MATTHEW ARNOLD'S CRITICISM. 119 

what a man taught, so that he taught it well. He 
has the same pleasure with Pope or Franklin as with 
Pascal or Massillon. " One loves, one adopts with 
pleasure," he says, "every kind of genius, every new 
talent." His mind flows around and around his sub- 
ject, and envelops it on all sides, and renders the 
clearest and fullest image of it. He is a pure, dis- 
embodied critical spirit, indulging itself to the utmost 
in the mere pleasure of criticising, of interpreting ; 
taking possession of every form or kind of genius with 
like ease and enjoyment, blending itself with it and 
drawing out its secret by a kind of literary clairvoy- 
ance. 

Arnold has not, in the same measure, this kind of 
power. He is less sympathetic and more analytical 
in his method, and more given to definition and to 
final judgments. He is also fuller of the spirit of re- 
proof and discipline than the Frenchman. The force 
of nature and character are less with him, and the 
authority of the rules and standards more. One 
would rather submit a bold and original genius to the 
judgment of the Frenchman ; he would see more 
reason for justifying it upon its own grounds, for 
allowing it to be a law unto itself ; but for a compar- 
ative judgment, to know where your original genius 
departs from the highest standards, wherein he trans- 
gresses the law, etc., one would go to Arnold. 

A recent English reviewer says that there are but 
two English authors of the present day whose works 
are preeminent for quality of style, namely, John 



120 INDOOR STUDIES. 

Morley and Cardinal Newman. But one would 
say that the man of all others among recent English 
writers who had in a preeminent degree the gift of 
what we call style — that quality in literature which 
is like the sheen of a bird's plumage — was Matthew 
Arnold. That Morley has this quality is by no 
means so certain. Morley is a vigorous, brilliant, 
versatile writer, but his quality is not distinctively lit- 
erary, and his sentences do not have a power and a 
charm by virtue of their very texture and sequence 
alone. Few writers, of any time or land, have had 
the unity, transparency, centrality of Arnold's mind 
— the piece or discourse is so well cast, it is so homo- 
geneous, it makes such a clear and distinct impres- 
sion. Morley 's vocabulary is the more copious ; more 
matters are touched upon in any given space ; he is 
more fruitful of ideas and suggestions ; his writings 
may have a greater political, or religious, or scien- 
tific value than Arnold's. But in pure literary value, 
they, in my opinion, fall far below. Arnold's work is 
like cut glass ; it is not merely clear, it has a distinc- 
tion, a prestige which belongs to it by reason of its 
delicate individuality of style. The writings of Car- 
dinal Newman have much of the same quality — the 
utmost lucidity combined with a fresh, distinct liter- 
ary flavor. They are pervaded by a sweeter, more 
winsome spiiut than Arnold's ; there is none of the 
scorn, contemptuousness, and superciliousness in them 
that have given so much offense in Arnold, and while 
his style is not so crisp as the latter's, it is perhaps 
more marvelously flexible and magnetic. 



matthew Arnold's criticism. 121 

Arnold is, above all things, integral and consecu- 
tive. He seems to have no isolated thoughts, no 
fragments, nothing that begins and ends in a mere 
intellectual concretion ; his thoughts are -all in the 
piece and have reference to his work as a whole ; 
they are entirely subordinated to plan, to structure, 
to total results. He values them, not as ends, but as 
means. In other words, we do not come upon those 
passages in his works that are like isolated pools of 
deep and beautiful meaning, and which make the 
value to us of writers like Landor, for instance, but 
we everywhere strike continuous currents of ideas 
that set definitely to certain conclusions ; always clear 
and limpid currents, and now and then deep, strong, 
and beautiful currents. And, after all, water was 
made to flow and not to stand, and those are the 
most vital and influential minds whose ideas are 
ivorking ideas, and lay hold of real problems. 

Certainly a man's power to put himself in commu- 
nication with live questions, and to take vital hold of 
the spiritual and intellectual life of his age, should 
enter into our estimate of him. We shall ask of a 
writer who lays claim to high rank, not merely has 
he great thoughts, but what does he do with his 
great thoughts ? Is he superior to them ? Can he 
use them ? Can he bring them to bear ? Can he 
wield them to clear up some obscurity or bridge over 
some difficulty for us, or does he sit down amid them 
and admire them ? A man who wields a great capital 
is above him who merely hoards it and keeps it. Let 



122 INDOOR STUDIES. 

me refer to Landor again, in this connection, because, 
in such a discussion, one wants, as they say in cro- 
quet, a ball to play on, and because Landor's works 
have lately been in my hands, and I have noted in 
them a certain remoteness and ineffectualness which 
contrast them well with Arnold's. Landor's sympa- 
thies were mainly outside his country and times, and 
his writings affect me like capital invested in jewels 
and precious stones, rather than employed in any 
great and worthy enterprise. One turns over his 
beautiful sentences with a certain admiration and 
enjoyment, but his ideas do not fasten upon one, and 
ferment and grow in his mind, and influence his 
judgments and feelings. It is not a question of ab- 
straction or of disinterestedness, but of seriousness 
of purpose. Emerson is more abstract, more given 
up to ideal and transcendental valuations, than Lan- 
dor ; but Emerson is a power, because he partakes of 
a great spiritual and intellectual movement of his 
times ; he is unequivocally of to-day and of New 
England. So with Arnold, he is unequivocally of to- 
day; he is unequivocally an Englishman, but an 
Englishman thoroughly imbued with the spirit of 
Greek art and culture. The surprise in reading 
Arnold is never the novelty of his thought or expres- 
sion, or the force with which his ideas are projected, 
but in the clearness and nearness of the point of 
view, and the steadiness and consistency with which 
the point of view is maintained. He is as free from 
the diseases of subtlety and over-refinement of thought 



MATTHEW ARNOLD'S CRITICISM. 123 

or expression, and from anything exaggerated or 
fanciful, as any of the antique authors. His distin- 
guishing trait is a kind of finer common-sense. One 
remembers his acknowledgment of his indebtedness 
to the sanity and clear sense of Franklin. It is here 
the two minds meet ; the leading trait of each is this 
same sanity and clear sense, this reliance upon the 
simple palpable reason. 

Arnold's reliance upon the near and obvious rea- 
son, and his distrust of metaphysical subtleties and 
curious refinements, are so constant, that he has been 
accused of parading the commonplace. But the com- 
monplace, when used with uncommon cleverness and 
aptness, is always the most telling. He thinks the 
great weakness of Christianity at the present time 
is its reliance, or pretended reliance, upon the preter- 
natural, and the whole burden of his own effort in 
this field is to show its basis upon common-sense, 
upon a universal need and want of mankind. For 
ingenious, for abstruse reasons Arnold has no taste 
at all, either in religion, in literature, or in politics, 
and the mass of readers will sympathize with him. 
" At the mention of that name metaphysics" he says, 
" lo, essence, existence, substance, finite and infinite, 
cause and succession, something and nothing, begin 
to weave their eternal dance before us, with the con- 
fused murmur of their combinations filling all the 
region governed by her who, far more indisputably 
than her late-born rival, political economy, has earned 
the title of the Dismal Science." 



124 INDOOR STUDIES. 

The dangers of such steadiness and literary con- 
servatism as Arnold's are the humdrum and the com- 
monplace ; but he is saved from these by his poetic 
sensibility. How homogeneous his page is, like air 
or water ! There is little color, little variety, but 
there is an interior harmony and fitness, that are like 
good digestion, or good health. Vivacity of mind 
he is not remarkable for, but in singleness and con- 
tinuity he is extraordinary. His seriousness of pur- 
pose seldom permits him to indulge in wit ; humor is 
a more constant quality with him. But never is there 
wit for wit's sake, nor humor for humor's sake ; they 
are entirely in the service of the main argument. 
The wit is usually a thrust, as when he says of the 
Nonconformist that he " has worshiped his fetich of 
separatism so long that he is likely to wish to remain, 
like Ephraim, ' a wild ass alone by himself.' " The 
book in which he uses the weapons of wit and humor 
the most constantly he calls, with refined sarcasm, 
" Friendship's Garland " — a garland made up 
mainly of nettles. Like all of his books, it is aimed 
at the British Philistine, but it is less Socratic than 
the other books and contains more of Dean Swift. 
Arnold is always a master of the artful Socratic 
method, but this book has, in addition, a playful hu- 
mor and a nettle-like irony — an itch which ends in 
a burn — that are more modern. "What a garland 
he drops by the hand of his Prussian friend Arminius 
upon the brow of Hepworth Dixon, in characterizing 
his style as " Middle-class Macaulayese : " — 



MATTHEW ARNOLD'S CRITICISM. 125 

' I call it Macaulayese,' says the pedant, ' because 
it has the same internal and external characteristics 
as Macaulay's style ; the external characteristic being 
a hard metallic movement with nothing of the soft 
play of life, and the internal characteristic being a per- 
petual semblance of hitting the right nail on the head 
without the reality. And I call it middle-class Ma- 
caulayese because it has these faults without the com- 
pensation of great studies and of conversance with 
great affairs, by which Macaulay partly redeemed 
them.' " 

By the hand of another character he crowns Mr. 
Sala thus : — 

" But his career and genius have given him some- 
how the secret of a literary mixture novel and fascinat- 
ing in the last degree : he blends the airy epicureanism 
of the salons of Augustus with the full-bodied gayety 
of our English Cider-cellar." 

Most of the London newspapers too receive their 
garland. That of " The Times " is most taking : — 

" ' Nay,' often this enthusiast continues, getting 
excited as he goes on, ' " The Times " itself, which so 
stirs some people's indignation, — what is " The 
Times " but a gigantic Sancho Panza, following by an 
attraction he cannot resist that poor, mad, scorned, 
suffering, sublime enthusiast, the modern spirit ; fol- 
lowing it, indeed, with constant grumbling, expostula- 
tion, and opposition, with airs of protection, of com- 
passionate superiority, with an incessant by-play of 
nods, shrugs, and winks addressed to the spectators ; 



126 INDOOR STUDIES. 

following it, in short, with all the incurable recalci- 
trancy of a lower nature, but still following it ? ' " 

In " Friendship's Garland " many of the shafts 
Arnold has aimed at his countrymen in his previous 
books are refeathered and repointed and shot with 
a grace and playful mockery that are immensely di- 
verting. He has perhaps never done anything so 
artistic and so full of genius. It fulfills its purpose 
with a grace and a completeness tbat awaken in one 
the feeling of the delicious ; it is the only one of his 
books one can call delicious. 

Anything like passion, or heat of the blood, Arnold 
is especially shy of. As Marcus Aurelius said of his 
imperial father, on all occasions he " stops short of 
the sweating point." Heat begets fumes and fumes 
cloud the sky, and Arnold's strength is always in his 
unclouded intelligence. An unclouded intelligence 
is among the supreme gifts, but it is not all. Ar- 
nold makes us so in love with it that we quite forget 
the broader and more intensely human qualities and 
the part they play in our highest mental operations. 
Truly, as he says in " Youth and Calm " — 

" Calm 's not life's crown, though calm is well." 

Arnold's desire for calm, for tranquillity, for per- 
fection, probably stands in the way of his full appre- 
ciation of certain types of men. All great movements 
and revolutions are at the expense of calm, of meas- 
ure, proportion, etc. A certain bias, a certain heat 



matthew Arnold's criticism. 127 

and onesidedness, are necessary to break the equili- 
brium and set the currents going. The master forces 
of this world, like Luther in religion, or Cromwell in 
politics, or Victor Hugo or Shakespeare in literature, 
or Turner in art, are not nicely measured and ad- 
justed. In the modern world, especially, is man one- 
sided, unclassical, fragmentary ; a great talent here, 
another there, but nowhere the wholeness and totality 
Arnold pleads for. 



ARNOLD'S VIEW OF EMERSON AND CAR- 
LYLE. 

During Matthew Arnold's first visit to this country 
in 1883-84, he lectured in various cities upon Emer- 
son, with whose name he linked that of Carlyle. I 
had the pleasure of hearing him in New York on the 
occasion of the second or third repetition of his lec- 
ture in that city. Some weeks previously I had met 
him at a reception at the house of a friend. In my 
note-book I find I made the following note of the im- 
pression he made upon me on this occasion : " Liked 
him better than I expected to. A large tall man with 
black hair streaked with gray, black close-cut side- 
whiskers, prominent nose, large coarse (but pure) mouth 
and muscular neck. In fact a much coarser man than 
you would expect to see, and stronger looking. A 
good specimen of the best English stock, plenty of 
color, a wholesome coarseness and open air look. 
One would say tbat he belonged to a bigger and 
more powerful race than the rest of the people in 
the room. His voice was more husky, more like a 
sailor's, I thought, than the other voices I heard. 
When he talks to you he throws bis head back (the 
reverse of Emerson's manner), and looks out from 
under his heavy eye-lids, and sights you down his 



Arnold's view of emerson and carlyle. 129 

big nose — draws off as it were, and gives you his 
chin. It is the critical attitude, not the sympathetic. 
Yet he does not impress one as cold and haughty, 
but quite the contrary." 

He was not an entertaining speaker ; his voice was 
too thick and foggy. One would rather read his dis- 
course than hear it. 

To one who knows Arnold's devotion to the classic 
standards, the calm and moderation of Greek art, his 
verdict upon such writers as Emerson and Carlyle 
will not be much of a surprise. Tried by the classic 
standards, both these illustrious men are undoubtedly 
barbarians. Emerson has indeed the lofty serenity 
of Greek art, but his fragmentary character, his mys- 
ticism, his exaggeration, his ceaseless effort to sur- 
prise, are anything but classical. The distinctive 
features of classic literature, its repose, its measure, 
its subordination of parts, and hence its wholeness, 
he probably cared little for. Speaking in one of his 
essays of how Greek sculpture has melted away like 
ice and snow in the spring, he says, " The Greek 
letters last a little longer, but are always passing 
under the same sentence, and tumbling into the in- 
evitable pit which the creation of new thought opens 
for all that is old." Carlyle is a barbarian in his 
style, his uncouthness, his vehemence, his despair, his 
prejudices, and in the open conflict and incongruity 
between his inherited and his acquired traits, between 
his German culture, which was from without, and 
his Scotch Presbyterianism, which was from within. 



130 INDOOR STUDIES. 

Carlyle had no tranquillity ; the waters of his soul 
were lashed into fury the whole time. The Greek was 
at ease in Zion, as Mr. Arnold somewhere says, but 
think of Carlyle being at ease in Zion ! Indeed, one 
must put his classic standards behind him, when he 
gives an unqualified admiration to either Emerson or 
Carlyle as men of letters. 

The force of Arnold's criticism came from the fact 
that it was by a man who had a real and tangible 
point of view of his own, and who, therefore, gave a 
real and consistent account of the subject he dis- 
cussed. His view of Emerson was not the view of 
Emerson generally held in this country, but it was 
such a view of him as puts any man who holds a con- 
trary one upon his mettle, and challenges him to give 
as good an account of his own faith. Much of the 
writing upon Emerson had been indiscriminating, and 
by men who had no definite point of view of their 
own. Even Mr. Morley's essay recently published is 
not so satisfying a piece of work as Arnold's, though 
he arrives at nearly the same conclusions ; but he 
wanders more in reaching them ; his course is not so 
direct and steady ; in fact, the point of view is not 
so clear and definite. He may conduct us to as com- 
manding a height, but there is often a tangle of words 
and fine phrases in the way. 

But it is the great merit of Matthew Arnold as a 
critic that he always has a clear and unmistakable 
point of view, that he always knows his point of view 
and never wanders far from it. The opening pas- 



Arnold's view of ejierson and carlyle. 181 

sages of Arnold's lecture were in a stream of such 
noble and impressive eloquence that I must indulge 
myself in transcribing some of them here. 

" Forty years ago," he began, " when I was an 
undergraduate at Oxford, voices were in the air then 
which haunt my memory still. Hapjjy the man who 
in that susceptible season of youth hears such voices ! 
they are a possession to him forever. No such voices 
as those we heard in our youth at Oxford are sound- 
ing there now. Oxford has more criticism now, more 
knowledge, more light ; but such voices as those of 
our youth it has no longer. The name of Cardinal 
Newman is a great name to the imagination still ; 
his genius and his style are still things of power. But 
he is over eighty years old ; he is in the Oratory at 
Birmingham ; he has adopted for the doubts and dif- 
ficulties which beset man's minds to-day, a solution 
which, to speak frankly, is impossible." ..." But 
there were other voices sounding in our ears besides 
Newman's. There was the puissant voice of Car- 
lyle ; so sorely strained, over-used, and misused since, 
but then fresh, comparatively sound, and reaching 
our hearts with true pathetic eloquence." ..." A 
greater voice still — the greatest voice of the century 
— came to us in those youthful years through Car- 
lyle : the voice of Goethe." ..." And beside those 
voices there came to us in that old Oxford time a 
voice also from this side of the Atlantic — a clear 
and pure voice, which for my ear, at any rate, 
brought a strain as new, and moving, and unforgetta- 



132 INDOOR STUDIES. 

ble as the strain of Newman or Carlyle or Goethe. 
Mr. Lowell has well described the apparition of Em- 
erson, to your young generation here, in the distant 
time of which I am speaking, and of his workings 
upon them. He was your Newman, your man of 
soul and genius visible to you in the flesh, speaking 
to your bodily ears — a present object for your heart 
and imagination. Tbat is surely the most potent of 
all influences ! nothing can come up to it. To us at 
Oxford, Emerson was but a voice speaking from 
three thousand miles away. But so well he spoke 
that from that time forth Boston Bay and Concord 
were names invested to my ear with a sentiment akin 
to tbat which invests for me the names of Oxford 
and Weimar ; and snatches of Emerson's strain fixed 
themselves in my mind as imperishably as any of the 
eloquent words which I have been just now quoting." 
A lofty and eloquent introduction was that, and one 
well worth the subject and the occasion. The disap- 
pointment and irritation which his hearers felt as the 
lecturer proceeded arose from the fact that the critic 
was at much less pains to justify this favorable view 
of Emerson which he had sounded in his opening 
note, than he was to establish the adverse view of 
him as a poet and philosopher, which he felt sure 
would in time be taken. The gist of the speaker's 
view of Emerson was briefly as follows : Emerson 
was not a great poet, was not to be ranked among the 
legitimate poets, because his poetry had not the Mil- 
tonic requirements of simplicity, sensuousness, and 



ARNOLD'S VIEW OF EMERSON AND CARLYLE. 133 

passion. He was not even a great man of letters, be- 
cause he had not a genius and instinct for style ; his 
style had not the requisite wholeness of good tissue. 
Who were the great men of letters ? They were 
Plato, Cicero, Voltaire, La Bruyere, Milton, Addison, 
Swift, — men whose prose is by a kind of native ne- 
cessity true and sound. Emerson was not a great 
philosopher, because he had no constructive talent, — 
he could not build a system of philosophy. What 
then was his merit ? He was to be classed with Mar- 
cus Aurelius, who was " the friend and aider of those 
who would live in the spirit." This was Emerson's 
chief merit and service : he was the friend and aider 
of those who would live in the spirit. The secret of 
his influence was not in his thought ; it was in his 
temper, his unfaltering spirit of cheerfulness and 
hope. 

In the opinion of the speaker, even Carlyle was not 
a great writer, and his work was of much less impor- 
tance than Emerson's. As Wordsworth's poetry was 
the most important work done in verse in our lan- 
guage during the nineteenth century, so Emerson's 
essays were, in the lecturer's view, the most impor- 
tant work done in prose. Carlyle was not a great 
writer, because he was too impatient, too willful, too 
vehement ; he did not work his material up into good 
literary form. 

In his essay on Joubert, Arnold says, following a 
remark of Sainte-Beuve, that as to the estimate of its 
own authors every nation is the best judge (the positive * 



134 INDOOR STUDIES. 

estimate, not the comparative, as regards the authors 
of other countries), and that, therefore, a foreigner's 
judgments about the intrinsic merits of a nation's 
authors will generally, when at complete variance 
with that nation's own, be wrong. Arnold's verdict 
upon Emerson's intrinsic merits was certainly at vari- 
ance with that of the best judges among Emerson's 
countrymen, and is likely, therefore, according to the 
above dictum, to be wrong. But whether it was or 
not, it is no doubt true that every people possesses a 
key to its own great men, or to those who share its 
tendencies and hopes, that a foreigner cannot possess, 
whatsoever keys of another sort he may bring with 
him. 

From Arnold's point of view, his criticism of 
Emerson was just and consistent ; but he said he 
spoke not of himself, but assumed to anticipate the 
verdict of time and fate upon this man. But time 
and fate have ways of their own in dealing with rep- 
utations, and the point of view of the future with 
reference to this subject is, I imagine, as likely to be 
different from Mr. Arnold's as it is to be one with it. 

In the view which the speaker took of Emerson 
and Carlyle, it seems to me that he laid too little 
stress upon their intrinsic quality of genius and of the 
real force and stimulus they left embodied in liter- 
ary forms, — imperfect or inadequate forms if you 
will, but still literary forms. Did the speaker draw 
out for us and impart to us what of worth and signifi- 
cance there was in these men ? Did he convey to us 



Arnold's view of emerson and carlyle. 135 

a lively impression of their genius ? I think not. 
And yet he has told us in his essay on Joubert that 
this is the main matter ; he asks, " What is really 
precious and inspiring, in all that we get from litera- 
ture, except this sense of an immediate contract with 
genius itself and the stimulus toward what is true and 
excellent which we derive from it ? " Like all other 
writers, when Arnold speaks from the traditions of 
his culture and the influence of his environment, he is 
far less helpful and satisfactory than when he speaks 
from his native genius and insight, and gives free 
play to that wonderfully clear, sensitive, flexible, 
poetic mind of his. And in this verdict upon Emer- 
son and Carlyle, it seems to me, he speaks more from 
his bias, more from his dislike of nonconformists than 
from his genius. 

We have had much needed service from Arnold ; 
he has taught his generation the higher criticism, as 
Sainte-Beuve taught it to his. A singularly logical 
and constructive mind, yet a singularly fluid and 
interpretative one, giving to his criticism charm, as 
well as force and penetration. 

All readers of his know how free he is from any- 
thing strained or fantastic or paradoxical, and how 
absolutely single his eye is. His page flows as limpid 
and tranquil as a meadow brook, loitering under this 
bank and under that, but yet really flowing, really 
abounding in continuous currents of ideas that lead 
to large and definite results. His works furnish 
abundant illustrations of the principle of evolution in 



136 INDOOR STUDIES. 

literature, which he demands of others. He makes 
no use of the Emersonian method of surprise ; his 
ideas never suddenly leap out full-grown from his 
Drain, but slowly develop and unfold before you, and 
there are no missing links. Any given thought is 
continuous with him, and grows and expands with 
new ramifications and radiations, from year to year. 
This gives a wonderful consecutiveness and whole- 
ness to his work, as well as great clearness and sim- 
plicity. Yet one sometimes feels as if his keen sense 
of form and order sometimes stood between him and 
the highest truths. I believe the notions we get 
from him of the scope and function of poetry, and of 
the value and significance of style, are capable of 
revision. 

Less stringency of form is to be insisted upon, less 
servility to the classic standards. We live in an age 
of expansion, not of concentration, as Arnold long 
ago said ; " like the traveler in the fable, therefore, 
we begin to wear our cloak a little more loosely." 
In literature, we are coming more and more to look 
beyond the form into the substance ; yea, into the 
mood and temper that begat the substance. 

" The chief trait of any given poet," says a recent 
authority, "is always the spirit he brings to the obser- 
vation of humanity and nature — the mood out of 
which he contemplates his subject. What kind of 
temper and what amount of faith reports these 
things ? " 

Of like purport is the well-known passage of Sainte- 



Arnold's view of emerson and carlyle. 137 

Beuve, wherein, after referring to the demands and 
standards of the classic age, he says that for us, to- 
day, " the greatest poet is not he who has done the 
best " — that is, written the most perfect poem from 
the classic standpoint ; " it is he who suggests the 
most, he, not all of whose meaning is at first obvi- 
ous, and who leaves you much to desire, to explain, 
to study, much to complete in your turn." 

In the decay of the old faiths, and in the huge 
aggrandizement of physical science, the refuge and 
consolation of serious and truly religious minds is 
more and more in literature, and in the free escapes 
and outlooks which it supplies. The best modern 
poetry, and the best modern prose, take clown the 
bars for us and admit us to new and large fields of 
moral and intellectual conquest in a way the antique 
authors could not and did not aim to do. New 
wants, and therefore new standards, have arisen. 
Purely literary poets like Shakespeare and Milton, 
priceless as they are, are of less service to mankind 
in an age like ours when religion is shunned by the 
religious soul, than the more exceptional poets and 
writers, like Goethe and Carlyle, or Wordsworth and 
Emerson — the wise physicians and doctors who also 
minister to our wants as moral and spiritual beings. 

The type of men of which Emerson and Carlyle 
are the most pronounced and influential examples in 
our time, it must be owned, are comparatively a new 
turn-up in literature, — men whose highest distinc- 
tion is the depth and fervor of their moral conviction, 



138 INDOOR STUDIES. 

whose greatness of character is on a par with their 
greatness of intellect ; a new style of man writing 
poems, essays, criticisms, histories, and filling these 
forms with a spirit and a suggestiveness far more 
needful and helpful to us in these times than the 
mere spirit of perfection in letters — the classic spirit, 
which Mr. Arnold himself so assiduously cultivates. 

To say that Carlyle is not a great writer, or, more 
than that, a supreme literary artist, is to me like 
denying that Angelo and Rembrandt were great 
painters, or that the sea is a great body of water. 
His life of herculean labor was entirely given to let- 
ters, and he undoubtedly brought to his tasks the 
greatest single equipment of pure literary talent Eng- 
lish prose has ever received. Beside some of the 
men named by the lecturer, his illuminating power is 
like the electric light beside a tallow dip. Not a 
perfect writer certainly, nor always an agreeable one ; 
but he exhibited at all times the traits which the 
world has consented to call great. He bequeathed to 
mankind an enormous intellectual force and weight of 
character, embodied in enduring literary forms. 

I know it has become the fashion to disparage 
Carlyle's histories ; it is said he has been superseded 
by the more scientific historians. When the scien- 
tific artist supersedes Michael Angelo. and the scien- 
tific poet supersedes Shakespeare, then probably the 
scientific historian will supersede Carlyle. The sci- 
entific spirit, when applied to historical problems, is 
— like chemistry applied to agriculture — valuable. 



Arnold's view of emerson and carlyle. 139 

but great results have been achieved in quite another 
spirit. Scientific method can exhume the past, but 
cannot breathe the breath of life into it, as Carlyle 
did. Your scientific critic is usually a wearisome 
creature. We do not so much want history explained 
after the manner of science as we want it portrayed 
and interpreted after the manner of literature. And 
the explanations of these experts is usually only clever 
thimble-rigging. If they ferret the mystery out of one 
hole, they run it to cover in another. How clever, 
for instance, is Taine's explanation of those brilliant 
epochs in the history of nations when groups of great 
men are produced, and literatures and arts get 
founded. Why, it is only the result of a " hidden 
concord of creative forces ; " and the opposite peri- 
ods, the periods of sterility, are the result of " inward 
contrarieties." Truly, a rose by any other name 
would smell as sweet. What causes the hidden con- 
cord, etc., so that we can lay our hand upon the 
lever and bring about the splendid epochs at a given 
time, the astute Frenchman does not tell us. I like 
better the explanation of the old Roman, Paterculus, 
namely, emulation among men ; yes, and emulation 
in Nature herself. One great orator, or poet, will 
make others. Or Emerson's suggestion, which is just 
as near the truth, and much more taking to the imag- 
ination : — 

" Heats or genial periods arrive in history, or, 
shall we say, plenitudes of Divine Presence, by 
which high tides are caused in the human spirit, and 



140 INDOOR STUDIES. 

great virtues and talents appear, as in the eleventh, 
twelfth, thirteenth, and again in the sixteenth and 
seventeenth centuries, when the nation (England) 
was full of genius and piety." 

Carlyle's bias does not, in my opinion, mar his 
histories at all, and we can always allow for it when 
he writes upon any subject, — upon America, for 
instance, or " Shooting Niagara." It does not mar 
his " Cromwell," but lends zest to it. He was him- 
self the fiery partisan he was portraying. It does 
not mar " Frederic," though the author's partialities 
and prepossessions crop out on every page. "What 
vivid portraiture, what rapid grouping, what reality, 
what exhaustless wit and humor, what entertainment 
for both heart and head this book holds ! 

Most readers of " Frederic," I imagine, find the 
work too long, and at times feel a strong inclination 
to " skip," an inclination which the author himself 
favors by putting his less important matter in finer 
type. A little more rigid selection and abridgment, 
and a little more patient fusing of the material so as 
to have brought the work within the compass of one 
third less space, and within the compass of the au- 
thor's best time and strength, and literature would 
have been the gainer. 

Carlyle's prose has its defects most assuredly. His 
periods are often like those swelled brick that have 
got too much of the fire — crabbed and perverse. 
His earnestness, his fury of conviction made it too 
hot for them ; his style becomes distorted. In the 



Arnold's view of emerson and carlyle. 141 

best prose there is always a certain smoothness and 
homogeneity. " In the very torrent, tempest (and as 
I may say), whirlwind of your passion," says Hamlet 
in his address to the players, " you must acquire and 
beget a temperance that will give it smoothness." If 
not external smoothness, then certainly internal — a 
fusion of blending that is like good digestion. Car- 
lyle does not always have this ; Emerson does not 
always have it ; Whitman does not always have it, 
probably does not always strive for it ; Browning 
rarely or never has it. There is a good deal in Car- 
lyle that is difficult, not in thought but in expression. 
To the reader it is a kind of mechanical difficulty, 
like walking over bowlders. In his best work, like 
the life of Sterling, his essays on Johnson and Vol- 
taire, and the battle pieces in " Frederic," there is the 
least of this. 

" There is a point of perfection in art," says La 
Bruyere, "as there is of goodness and ripeness in 
nature. He who feels and loves it has perfect taste ; 
he who feels it not, who loves something beneath or 
beyond it, has faulty taste." In the life of Sterling, 
more completely than in any other one of his books, 
Carlyle attains to this goodness and ripeness of na- 
ture. He is calm and mellow ; there is nothing to 
inflame him, but everything to soften and quiet him, 
and his work is of unrivaled richness in all the no- 
blest literary qualities. But at other times he was 
after something beneath or beyond the point of per- 
fection in art. He was not primarily a critical or 



142 INDOOR STUDIES. 

literary force like Arnold himself, but a moral force 
working in and through literature. He was the con- 
science of his country and times, wrought up to an 
almost prophetic fervor and abandonment, and to cut 
deep was more a point with him than to cut smooth. 

Again, his defects as a writer probably arose out 
of his wonderful merits as a talker. He was in the 
first instance a talker, and he came finally to write 
as he talked, so that the page, to retain all its charm 
and effectiveness, needs the Carlyle voice and man- 
ner, and the Carlyle laugh superadded. These would 
give it smoothness and completion. One rather likes 
a certain roughness in a man's style, but it must be a 
smooth roughness ; the roughness of a muscular arm, 
and not of a malformed or an ill-shapen one. 

Of course all these considerations tell against Car- 
lyle's claim to be considered a great writer ; yet one 
may freely admit them and still call him a great 
writer. Style alone does not make the great writer, 
any more than faultless tactics make the great gen- 
eral ; and the upshot of Carlyle's literary life is an 
array of volumes, not without serious blemishes, it is 
true, like the campaigns of Frederic, or Wellington, 
or Grant, but which, nevertheless, represent a solidity 
and splendor of achievement, such as the world calls 
great. 

Arnold criticised what he called Carlyle's " per- 
verse attitude towards happiness," but it was only 
a cheap, easy happiness that Carlyle railed against. 
He taught that there was a higher happiness, namely, 



Arnold's view of emfrson and carlyle. 143 

blessedness — the spiritual fruition that comes through 
renunciation of self, the happiness of heroes that 
conies from putting thoughts of happiness out of 
sight ; and that the direct and persistent wooing of 
fortune for her good gifts was selfish and unmanly, 
— a timely lesson at all seasons. 

Emerson, too, is a great figure in modern literary 
history, and to his worth and significance, in this 
connection, the speaker did very inadequate justice. 
We know there is much in Emerson's works that will 
not stand rigid literary tests ; much that is too fanci- 
ful and ethereal, too curious and paradoxical, — not 
real or true, but only seemingly so, or so by a kind 
of violence and disruption. The weak place in him 
as a literary artist is probably his want of continuity 
and the tie of association — a want which, as he grew 
old, became a disease, and led to a break in his mind 
like that of a bridge with one of the piers gone, and 
his power of communication was nearly or quite lost. 
Anything like architectural completeness Emerson 
did not possess. There is no artistic conception that 
runs the length and breadth of any of his works ; no 
unity of scheme or plan like that of an architect, or 
of a composer, that makes an inevitable whole of any 
of his books or essays ; seldom a central and leading 
idea of which the rest are but radiations and unfold- 
ings. His essays are fragmentary, successions of 
brilliant and startling affirmations, or vaticinations, 
with little or no logical sequence. In other words, 
there are seldom any currents of ideas in Emerson's 



144 INDOOR STUDIES. 

essays, but sallies and excursions of the mind, as if 
to get beyond the region of rational thinking into the 
region of surmise and prophecy, — jets and projec- 
tiles of thought under great pressure, the pressure of 
the moral genius. He says, speaking more for him- 
self than for others : " We learn to prefer imperfect 
theories and sentences, which contain glimpses of the 
truth, to digested systems, which have no one valu- 
able suggestion." It would be almost impossible to 
condense any of his essays ; they are the last results 
of condensation ; we can only cut them up and abridge 
them. So far as this criticism tells against Emerson 
as a literary artist, it must be allowed. 

Emerson speaks slightingly of logic, but his own 
prose is undoubtedly the best when it is the most 
logical — that is, the most consecutive and flowing. 
Logic in this sense is no more the enemy of sponta- 
neity than his method of bold guessing is. " Logic," 
he says, " is the procession or proportionate unfold- 
ing of the intuition." This " unfolding " is indispen- 
sable to all good prose, and Arnold did not lay too 
much stress upon it. Emerson's prose does not al- 
ways have it, and just in proportion as it is without 
it, is it unsound prose. When the reader comes upon 
a continuous passage in the Essays, one in which the 
thought is unfolded and carried along from point to 
point, how easily and joyously the mind passes over 
it. It is like a continuous path, after we have been 
picking our way from one isolated stone to another. 
The first chapter in " Representative Men," on the 



Arnold's view of emerson and carlyle. 145 

use of great men, is a stony and broken path ; the 
mind labors more or less in getting through it ; but 
the chapters that follow have much more unity and 
wholeness — much more smoothness and continuity 
of thought. So has " English Traits " more consecu- 
tiveness and unity than the Essays. Among the Es- 
says the one on Books, on Immortality, on Nature, 
on Beauty, on Self-Reliance, have more logical se- 
quence and evolution than certain others. 

Emerson's style is best when he is dealing with 
something real and tangible before him, as in his 
biographical and descriptive papers, his " English 
Traits," etc., and poorest in his " Dial " papers, etc. 
His letters often seem stilted and affected, but they, 
nevertheless, contain many samples of his best prose. 
Take this from a letter to Carlyle about " Frederic." 
" But the manner of it ! — the author sitting as Dem- 
iurgus, trotting out his manikins, coaxing and banter- 
ing them, amused with their good performance, pat- 
ting them on the back, and rating the naughty dolls 
when they misbehave ; and communicating his mind 
ever in measure, just as much as the young public 
can understand ; hinting the future, when it would 
be useful ; recalling now and then illustrative anec- 
dotes of the actor, impressing the reader that he is 
in possession of the entire history centrally seen, that 
his investigation has been exhaustive, and that he de- 
scends too on the petty plot of Prussia from higher 
and cosmical surveys." 

Who will say that the pen which wrote that is not 



146 INDOOR STUDIES. 

capable of good and sound prose as well as of very- 
acute and telling criticism ? Carlyle's egotism and 
patronizing ways in his histories have never been 
better touched off. 

If Emerson did not have the gift of style in the 
rather exclusive sense in which Arnold uses the term, 
he had something which is a very good substitute for 
it, — he had a fresh tonic quality of mind which he 
imparted to nearly everything he wrote. A man's 
use of language reveals the very fibre and texture of 
his mind. Silk is silk, and hemp is hemp, and the 
hand knows the difference wherever it touches them, 
but in literature the same words are silk or hemp, 
according to the mind tbat uses them. Emerson's 
page nearly always makes the impression of this finer 
and more precious quality, and whatever may be its 
defects belongs to literature pure and simple. 

Probably the best test of good prose is this : It is 
always creative ; it begets in the mind of the reader 
a deep and pervading sense of life and reality. Now 
that Arnold is gone, how many writers of creative 
prose are there in England ? Now that Emerson is 
gone, how many are there in America ? Is Mr. 
Gladstone's prose creative ? Far from it, I think. 
Is Mr. Ruskin's. With all his brilliancy, I think 
Ruskin lacks the creative touch. Emerson falls short 
of it many times, but at his best the creative power 
of the best prose was assuredly his. He often had 
that felicity of utterance that diffuses such light and 
joy in the mind. 



Arnold's view of emerson and carlyle. 147 

The greatness of his work consists in the measure 
of pure genius and of inspiration to noble and heroic 
conduct which it holds. As a writer he had but one 
aim, namely, to inspire, to wake up his reader or 
hearer to the noblest and the highest there was in 
him ; and it was no part of his plan to enter into com- 
petition with the Addisonian writers for the produc- 
tion of perfect literary work — perfect from the 
standpoint of extrinsic form, argument, logic, evolu- 
tion. His purpose did not require it, his genius did 
not demand it. He was to scatter the seed-germs of 
nobler thinking and living, not to rear a temple to the 
Muses ; and from our point of view the former is by 
far the more important service. To get at the full 
worth of Emerson, I say, we must appraise him for 
his new and fundamental quality of genius, not for his 
mere literary accomplishments, great as these were. 

li it is replied that this is just what the lecturer 
did, I say the word of highest praise, all through the 
discourse, was given to the master of mere literary 
form. There was a tone of disparagement toward 
Emerson as a man of letters, when there should have 
been generous approval of the quickening and liber- 
ating spirit he brought to letters. 

Emerson's message is of the highest importance, 
and he renders it with rare effectiveness and charm. 
His page is an enticement to the aesthetic sense of the 
intellect, and a stimulus and tonic to the ethical sense 
of the moral nature. 

The essay makes no unit of impression, though 



148. INDOOR STUDIES. 

undoubtedly the personality of the writer does ; and 
this, I think, largely makes up, in such a writer as 
Emerson, for the want of inclosing design to which 
I have referred. The design that gives unity and 
relevancy to these isolated paragraphs is the person- 
ality of Emerson, his peculiar type and idiosyncrasy. 
This is the plan, the theme which these musical pe- 
riods illustrate. The artist, says Goethe, " make 
what contortions he will, can only bring to light his 
own individuality." Of men of the Emersonian and 
Woi'dsworthian stamp, this is preeminently true ; and 
it is this which finally interests us and gives the to- 
tality of impression in their works. The flavor of 
character is over all ; the features of the man are 
stamped upon every word. From this point of view, 
much faultless and forcible writing — the writer al- 
ways under the sway of Arnold's law of pure and 
flawless workmanship — is destitute of intrinsic style, 
because it is destitute of individuality. In the case 
of Emerson, the only new thing in the book is the 
man ; this is the surprising discovery ; but this makes 
all things new ; we see the world through a new per- 
sonal medium. 

Everything Emerson wrote belongs to literature, 
and to literature in its highest and most serious 
mood. If not a great man of letters, then a great 
man speaking through letters, and delivering himself 
with a charm and a dignity few have equaled. We 
cannot deny him literary honors, though we honor 
him for much more than his literary accomplishments. 



ARNOLD'S VIEW OF EMERSON AND CARLYLE. 149 

No more could a bird fly without wings, than could 
Emerson's thought have reached and moved Arnold 
in his early Oxford days, without rare qualities of 
literary style. 

All Emerson's aspirations were toward greatness 
of character, greatness of wisdom, nobility of soul. 
Hence, in all his writings and speakings the great 
man shines through and ecbqsses the great writer. 
The flavor of character is stronger than the flavor of 
letters, and dominates the pages. 

If he is " the friend and aider of those who would 
live in the spirit," he is equally the friend and aider 
of those who would found a great state, a great liter- 
ature, a great art. The spirit he brought to his task, 
and which he displayed through his life, is a stimulus 
and a support to all noble endeavor, of whatever kind 
or in whatever field. 

Yet it is to be said that neither Emerson nor Car- 
lyle was a typical literary man. They both had too 
great moral vehemence, or bent, to be the doctors and 
professors of mere literature for and of itself. They 
both belong to that class of writers who are not so 
much critics of life, as feeders and reinforcers of 
life ; who gather in from wide lying realms not al- 
ways with nice judgment or wise selection, but always 
with bold, strong hands, much that nourishes and fer- 
tilizes the very roots of the tree Igdrasil. Such writ- 
ers were Emerson and Carlyle. Such a writer is not 
Mr. Arnold, though his function as pruner and culti- 
vator of the tree is scarcely less in importance. 



150 INDOOR STUDIES. 

Disinterestedness is to be demanded of the critic, 
but the creative imagination may have free play- 
within the limits of a strong intellectual bias. The 
charm and value of Darwin is his disinterestedness, 
but Darwin is a critic of the scheme of creation : he 
is interested only in finding and stating the largest 
truth, in outlining the theory that will cover the great- 
est multitude and the widest diversity of facts. But 
the charm and value of such a writer as Abram Cow- 
ley, or Mr. Ruskin, or our Thoreau, is largely given 
by a peculiar moral and mental bias. It is Thoreau's 
stoicism and vehement partiality to nature that gives 
his page such a fillip and genial provocation. And 
what would Mr. Ruskin be without his delightful one- 
sidedness and bright unreasonableness ? 

Few men eminent in literature have been free from 
some sort of bias. Arnold himself has the academic 
bias. There is in him a slight collegiate contemptu- 
ousness and aloofness which stands a little in the way 
of his doing full justice, say, to the nonconformist, 
and to the bereaved mortal who wants to marry his 
deceased wife's sister, and in the way of his full ac- 
ceptance by his countrymen, to which he is justly en- 
titled. Was he not also just a little interested in giv- 
ing our pride in Emerson a fall, at least a shaking 
up ? Milton is biased by his Puritanism ; his " Par- 
adise Lost " is the pageant or drama of the Puritan 
theology ; but he is undoubtedly best as a poet when 
he forgets his Puritanism. "Wordsworth has the di- 
dactic bias ; his steed of empyrean is yoked with 






Arnold's view of emerson and carlyle. 151 

another of much commoner clay. Carlyle's bias is 
an over-weening partiality for heroes ; he cuts all his 
cloth to this one pattern. Among our own writers, 
Bryant, Longfellow, Irving have little or no bias : 
they are disinterested witnesses, but they are not men 
of the first order. Our younger corps of writers are 
free from bias, which is less a merit than their want 
of earnestness is a defect. 

Arnold's view of Emerson as a poet is not entirely 
new, though perhaps it has never before been set 
forth in quite so telling and authoritative a form. 
The British literary journals have been in the habit 
of saying for years, whenever the subject was up, that 
Emerson was not a poet. An able London critic 
likened him to a Druid who wanders among the 
bards, and smites the harp with even more than bar- 
dic stress. And a poet on the usual terms we must 
admit Emerson was not. He truly had a druidical 
cast. His song is an incantation. Not a minstrel at 
the feast of life is he, but a chanter of runes at life's 
shrine. Arnold gave us the worst that could be said 
of Emerson as a poet, namely, that he lacked con- 
creteness, sensuousness, and passion. Perhaps the 
best that can be said of him as a poet is that, not- 
withstanding these deficiencies, there is usually a 
poetic stress in his verse, a burden and an intensity 
of poetic appeal, that would be hard to match in any 
other poet. He had the eye and ear of the poet pre- 
ternaturally sharpened, but lacked the full poetic ut- 
terance. It would seem as if he besieged the Muses 



152 INDOOR STUDIES. 

with all the more seriousness and eloquence, because 
of the gifts that had been denied him. His verse is 
full of disembodied poetic values, of "melody born of 
melody." Compared with the other poets, he is like 
an essence compared to fruits or flowers. He pierced 
the symbol, he discarded the corporeal ; his science 
savors of magic, his power of some mysterious occult 
force. Yet to say he is not a true poet implies too 
much ; he does not stop short of the achievements of 
other poets, but goes beyond them. He would get 
rid of the bulk, the mass, and save the poetry ; get 
rid of the concrete and catch the ideal ; in other 
words, turn your mountain of carbon into diamonds. 

As a rule, the qualities we miss from his verse, he 
did not aim to put there ; he did not himself value 
them in poetry. He knew the classic models were 
not for him. He valued only the memorable pas- 
sages, the lightning strokes of genius, the line that 

"overleapt the horizon's edge," 
and 

"Searched with Apollo's privilege." 
He hung his verses in the wind : — 

' ' All were winnowed through and through, 
Five lines lasted sound and true ; 
Five were smelted in a pot 
Than the South more fierce and hot ; 
These the siroc could not melt, 
Fire their fiercer flaming felt, 
And the meaning was more white 
Than July's meridian light. 



ARNOLD'S VIEW OF EMERSON AND CARLYLE. 153 

Sunshine cannot bleach the snow, 
Nor time unmake what poets know. 
Have you eyes to find the five 
Which five hundred did survive ? ' ' 

This was Emerson's method, — not to write a per- 
fect poem, a poem that should be an inevitable whole, 
as Arnold would have him, but to write the perfect 
line, to set the imagination ablaze with a single verse, 
leaving the effects of form, of proportion, to be 
achieved by those who were equipped for it. His 
poetry is undoubtedly best when it is most concrete, 
as in the " Humblebee," " Rhodora," " Seashore," 
"The Snow -Storm," "The Problem," "The Tit- 
mouse," and like poems, and poorest in " Wood 
Notes," " Celestial Love," etc. " Unless the heart is 
shook," says Landor, " the gods thunder and stride in 
vain ; " and the heart is seldom shook by Emerson's 
poetry. It has heat, but it is not that of English 
poetical literature, the heat of the blood, of the affec- 
tions, the emotions ; but arises from the ecstasy of 
contemplation of the universality of the moral law. 

It is hard to reconcile Arnold's criticism of Emer- 
son's poetry with what many of us feel to be its 
beauty and value. It is irritating to Emersonians to 
be compelled to admit that his strain lacks any essen- 
tial quality. I confess that I would rather have his 
poetry than all Milton, Cowper, Gray, Byron, and 
many others ever wrote, but doubtless in such a con- 
fession I am only pointing out my own limitations as 
a reader of the poets. This is the personal estimate 



154 INDOOR STUDIES. 

which Arnold condemns. I see the grounds upon 
which Milton's poetry is considered greater, but I do 
not care for it, all the same. Emerson's poetry does 
not dilate me, as Wordsworth's does, because the hu- 
man emotional element in it is weaker. It has not 
the same touch of nature that makes the whole world 
kin, the touch of commonalty heightened and vivified. 

Whether we know it or not, we doubtless love 
Emerson all the more because he is not a legitimate 
poet or the usual man of letters, but an exceptional 
one. We do not love Shakespeare in the same way, 
because he is of no special and peculiar service to us 
as men and moral beings ; he is not dear to any 
man, but generously beloved by all men. He is in 
the midst of the great currents of life and nature. 
'T is the universal air, the universal water we get 
here. But Emerson stands apart. 

We go to him as we go to a fountain to drink, and 
to a fountain of peculiar virtues, a fountain that con- 
tains iron, or sulphur, or some other medicinal prop- 
erty. Hence, while to criticism Emerson is less than 
Gray or Milton, to us who need his moral and spir- 
itual tonics he is more, vastly more. We live in a 
sick age, and he has saved the lives of many of us. 
So precious has his service been, so far beyond the 
reach of mere literature, that we are irritated, I say, 
when we hear the regular literary men placed above 
him. When I think of Emerson, I think of him as 
a man, not as an author ; it was his rare and charm- 
ing personality that healed us and kindled our love. 



ARNOLD'S VIEW OF EMERSON AND CARLYLE. 155 

When he died, it was not as a sweet singer, like 
Longfellow, who had gone silent ; but something 
precious and paternal had departed out of nature ; 
a voice of hope and courage, and inspiration to all 
noble endeavor, had ceased to speak. 

As a prose writer there is one note in Emerson 
which we get with the same emphasis and clearness 
in no other writer. I mean the heroic note, the note 
of manhood rising above the accidents of fortune and 
the tyranny of circumstances, the inspiration of cour- 
age and self-reliance. It is in Carlyle, but is often 
touched by his ill-humor. When Teufelsdrockh fulmi- 
nates his " Everlasting No " in " Sartor," it rings out 
like a thunder-peal ; this is the wrath and invincibility 
of the hero at bay. If, in Emerson's earlier essays, 
this note seems to us now a little too pronounced, 
savoring just a little of " tall talk," it did not seem so 
when we first read them, but was as clear, and frank, 
and sweet as the note of a bugle. Carlyle once de- 
fined poetry as the " heroic of speech," a definition 
that probably would not suit Mr. Arnold, but which 
describes much of Emerson's verse, and many of 
those brave sentences in his essays. 

If in Addison the note is that of genial urbanity, 
in Franklin that of worldly prudence ('' There is a 
flower of religion, a flower of honor, a flower of 
chivalry," says Sainte-Beuve, " which must not be 
required from Franklin "). in Bacon of large wisdom, 
in Pope of polished common sense, in Arnold himself 
the classical note or note of perfection, in Emerson 



156 INDOOR STUDIES. 

we come at once upon the chivalrous, heroic attitude 
and temper. No scorn, no contempt, no defiance, 
hut a bright and cheerful confronting of immense 
odds. In other writers there are words of prudence, 
words of enlightenment, words of grave counsel, 
words that divide one thing from another like a 
blade, words of sympathy and love ; but in Emerson 
more than in any other there are words that are like 
banners leading to victory, symbolical, inspiring, 
rallying, seconding, and pointing the way to your 
best endeavor. " Self-trust," he says, " is the essence 
of heroism," and this martial note pulses through all 
his utterances. It is found in others, too, but it is 
the leading note in him. In others it is often the in- 
spiration of conduct ; in him it is the inspiration of 
morals. 

The quality I refer to is in this passage from Mar- 
cus Aurelius : — 

" Suppose that men kill thee — cut thee in pieces 
— curse thee. What, then, can these things do to 
prevent thy mind from remaining pure, wise, sober, 
just ? " 

It is in these lines from Beaumont and Fletcher's 
" Sea Voyage," quoted by Emerson himself : — 

" Jidietta. Why, slaves, 'tis in our power to hang ye. 
" Master. Very likely. 'Tis in our power, then, to be 
hanged, and scorn ye." 

It is the salt of this passage of another poet : — 

" How beggarly appear arguments before a defiant deed ! 
How the floridness of the materials of cities shrivels before a 
man's or woman's look ! " 



Arnold's view of emerson and carlyle. 157 

It is in the reply of the Spartan soldier who, when 
the threatening Persian told him their arrows would 
darken the sun, answered: "Very well, then; we 
will fight in the shade." Emerson sounds the same 
note throughout his essays, takes the same attitude 
toward circumstances, toward conventions, toward 
tradition, toward theological dogma, toward every- 
thing that would hamper and limit him. It shines in 
his famous boast : — 

" Give me health and a day, and I will make the 
pomp of emperors ridiculous." 

There is a glint of it in this passage, which might 
have been written to comfort John Brown, or reas- 
sure a certain much-abused poet, had it not been be- 
fore the fact, a prophecy and not a counsel : — 

" Adhere to your own act, and congratulate your- 
self if you have done something strange and extrav- 
agant, and broken the monotony of a decorous age." 

Here it takes another key : — 

" If we dilate on beholding the Greek energy, the 
Roman pride, it is that we are already domesticating 
the same sentiment. Let us find room for this great 
guest in our small houses. The first step of worthi- 
ness will be to disabuse us of our superstitious associ- 
ations with places and times, with number and size. 
Why should these words Athenian, Roman, Asia, and 
England so tingle in the ear ? Where the heart is, 
there the muses — there the gods sojourn, and not in 
any geography of fame. Massachusetts, Connecticut 
River, and Boston Bay, you think paltry places, and 



158 INDOOR STUDIES. 

the ear loves names of foreign and classical typog- 
raphy. But here we are, and if we will tarry a little, 
we may come to learn that here is best. See to it 
only that thyself is here — and art and nature, hope 
and fate, friends and angels, and the Supreme Being, 
shall not be absent from the chamber where thou 
sittest." 

Half the essays are to this tune. " Books," he 
said, " are for nothing but to inspire ; " and in writ- 
ing his own he had but one purpose in view, to be, as 
Arnold so well says, " the friend and aider of those 
who would live in the spirit" — in the spirit of truth, 
in the spirit of virtue, in the spirit of heroism. 

The lecturer was unfortunate in what he said of 
Emerson's " Titmouse." We do not learn, he said, 
what his titmouse did for him ; we are reduced to 
guessing; he was not poet enough to tell us. But 
the bird sounded the heroic note to the poet, and 
inspired him with courage and hope when he was 
about to succumb to the cold. 

' ' Here was this atom in full breath, 
Hurling defiance at vast death. 

Henceforth I wear no stripe but thine ; 
Ashes and jet all hues outshine. 

I think old Caesar must have heard 
In northern Gaul my dauntless bird, 
And, echoed in some frosty wold, 
Borrowed thy battle-numbers bold. 

Paan! Veni, vidi, vici." 



Arnold's view of emerson and carlyle. 159 

It is one of Emerson's most characteristic poems. 
Burns, the speaker said, would have handled the 
subject differently, thinking probably of Burns's 
" Mouse." Certainly he would. He was pitched in 
a different key. The misfortunes of his mouse 
touched his sympathy and love, appealed to his hu- 
man tenderness, and called up the vision of his own 
hard lot. Each poet gives us the sentiment proper 
to him ; the heroic from Emerson, the human from 
Burns. The lecturer was right in saying that the 
secret of Emerson's influence is his temper, but it is 
not merely his good temper, his cheerfulness, hope- 
fulness, benevolence, etc. These he shared with the 
mass of his countrymen. The American tempera- 
ment is sanguine and turns confidently to the future. 
But it is again his heroic temper, his faith in " the 
ideal tendencies," in the value of personal force and 
character, in the grandeur of the present moment, 
the present opportunity ; a temper he shares with but 
few, but shares, say, with his friend and master, Car- 
lyle:- 

"One equal temper of heroic hearts." 
and more especially in Carlyle's case, 

" Made weak by time and fate, hut strong in will 
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield." 

It has long been clear to me that Carlyle and 
Emerson were in many important respects closely 
akin, notwithstanding the wrath and melancholy of 
the one, and the serenity and hopefulness of the 



160 INDOOR STUDIES. 

other. Their main ground of kinship is the heroic 
sentiment which they share in common. Their effects 
upon the mind are essentially the same : both have the 
" tart cathartic virtue " of courage and self-reliance ; 
both nourish character and spur genius. Carlyle 
does not communicate the gloom he feels ; 't is the 
most tonic despair to be found in literature. There 
is a kind of felicity in it. For one thing, it sprang 
from no personal disappointment or selfishness. It 
always has the heroic tinge. In a letter to Emerson 
he refers to it as a " kind of imperial sorrow that is 
almost like felicity, — so completely and composedly 
wretched, one is equal to the very gods." His 
wretchedness was a kind of sorrow ; that is always 
its saving feature. One's unhappiness may be selfish 
and ignoble, or it may be noble and inspiring; all 
depends upon the sentiment from which it springs. 
Men selfishly wretched never laugh, except in deri- 
sion. Carlyle was a man of sorrow, and sorrow 
springs from sympathy and love. A sorrowing man 
is a loving man. His is the Old World sorrow, the 
inheritance of ages, the grief of justice and retribu- 
tion over the accumulated wrongs and sufferings of 
centuries. In him it became a kind of poetic senti- 
ment, a fertile leaf-mould that issued at last in positive 
verdure and bloom. Not happiness, but a kind of 
blessedness, he aspired to, the satisfaction of suffer- 
ing in well-doing. How he loves all the battling, 
struggling, heroic souls ! "Whenever he comes upon 
one such in his histories, no matter how obscure, he 



Arnold's view of emerson and carlyle. 161 

turns aside to lay a wreath upon his tomb. It "was 
his own glory that he never flinched ; that his despair 
only nerved him to work the harder ; the thicker the 
gloom, the more his light shone. Hope and heart 
never left him ; they were of the unquenchable, the 
inextinguishable kind, like those ragged jets of flame 
the traveler used to see above the oil wells or gas 
wells in Pennsylvania, which the wildest tempest 
could not blow out, so tenaciously and desperately 
did the flame cling. 

Carlyle's lamentations are loud ; a little of his own 
doctrine of silence would have come in well here. 
What he said of Voltaire, the world is bound to say 
of himself : " Truly M. de Voltaire had a talent for 
speech, but lamentably wanted that of silence." But 
he worked like a Hercules. He does not charm the 
demons away like Emerson, but he defies them. 
Emerson wins them over, but Carlyle explodes them 
with their own sulphur. Both men rendered their 
age and country a signal service, and to rule them 
out of the company of the great authors is to rob 
that company of the two names of this century it can 
least afford to lose. 



GILBERT WHITE'S BOOK. 

I was moved to take down my White's " Selborne " 
and examine it again for the source of the delight I 
had had in it, on hearing a distinguished literary man, 
the late Richard Grant White, say it was a book he 
could not read with any degree of pleasure : to him 
its pages were a bare record of uninteresting facts. 
It was not because he felt no interest in or sympathy 
with the kind of literature to which White's " Sel- 
borne " belongs, for he confessed a liking for certain 
other writers in this field, but because both White's 
matter and manner were void of interest to him. 
The book was doubtless pitched in too low a key for 
him : it was tame and commonplace, like the country 
itself. There is indeed something a little disappoint- 
ing in White's book when one takes it up for the first 
time, with his mind full of its great fame. It is not 
seasoned quite up to the modern taste. White is 
content that the facts of nature should be just what 
they are ; his concern alone is to see them just as 
they are. When I myself first looked into his book, 
many years ago, I found nothing in it that attracted 
me, and so passed it by. Much more recently it fell 
into my hands, when I felt its charm and value at 
once. Indeed, the work of the Selborne naturalist 



GILBERT WHITE'S BOOK. 163 

belongs to the class of books that one must discover 
for himself : their quality is not patent ; he that runs 
may not read them. Like certain fruits, they leave a 
lingering flavor in the mouth that is much better than 
the hrst taste promised. In some congenial mood or 
lucky moment you find them out. I remember I had 
the little book of Essays of Abraham Cowley some 
years before I succeeded in reading it. One sum- 
mer day I chanced to take it with me on my walk to 
the woods, and at the foot of a waterfall in a very 
secluded place I suddenly discovered that the essays 
had a quality and a charm that I had never sus- 
pected they possessed. The book was the fruit of a 
certain privacy and seclusion from the world, and it 
required in the reader the frame of mind which these 
beget to enter fully into it. I suspect that some such 
auspicious moment or preparation is necessary to a 
full appreciation of White's letters. It is necessary, 
in the first place, that you be a born countryman, ca- 
pable of a certain fellowship and intimacy with your 
brute neighbors and with the various shows of rural 
nature. Then a quiet, even tenor of life, such as can 
be had only in the country, is also necessary, — a 
way of life that goes slow, and lingers upon the im- 
pression of the moment, and returns to it again and 
again, that makes much of little things, and is closely 
observant of the face of the day and of the landscape, 
and into which the disturbing elements of the great 
hurly-burly outside world do not enter. Being thus 
surrounded and thus inclined, in the fall, when you 



164 INDOOR STUDIES. 

first build a fire in your grate and begin to feel again 
like browsing along the old paths, open White's 
" Selborne," and read a chapter here and there, and 
bend your ear attentively to his quiet, cheerful, but 
earnest talk. Each letter shall seem addressed to 
you personally with news from the fields and by-ways 
you so lately visited. The pastoral quiet and sweet- 
ness and harmony of the English landscape pervade 
them all, with just that tinge of reminiscence, that 
flavor of human sympathy and human absorption, that 
English fields suggest. The style is like a rich, ten- 
der sward, simple and unobtrusive, with scarcely a 
flower of rhetoric anywhere, but very pleasing and 
effective and entirely adequate : it is nature and art 
perfectly married, each seconding the other. Its 
brevity, its directness, its simplicity, its dealings with 
familiar and near-at-hand objects, shows, occur- 
rences, etc., make it a book which never sates and 
never tires the reader. It is little more than an ap- 
petizer, but as such it takes high rank. As a stimu- 
lus and spur to the study of natural history, it has no 
doubt had more influence than any other work of the 
century. Its merits in this direction alone would 
perhaps account for its success. But, while it has 
other merits, and great ones, it has been a fortunate 
book : it has had little competition ; it has had the 
wind always with it, so to speak. It furnished a 
staple the demand for which was always steady and 
the supply small. There was no other book of any 
merit like it for nearly a hundred years. It contains 



GILBERT WHITE'S BOOK. 165 

a great deal of good natural history and acute obser- 
vations upon various rural subjects, put up in a cheap 
and portable form. The contemporary works of 
Pennant are voluminous and costly, — heavy sailing- 
craft that come to port only in the great libraries, 
while this is a nimble, light-draught vessel that has 
found a harbor on nearly every man's book-shelf. 

Hence we say that while it is not one of the great 
books, it is one of the very real books, one of the very 
live books, and has met and supplied a tangible want 
in the English reading world. It does not appeal to 
a large class of readers, and yet no library is com- 
plete without it. It is valuable as a storehouse of 
facts, it is valuable as a treatise on the art of observing 
things, and it is valuable for its sweetness and charm 
of style. 

What an equable, harmonious, and gracious spirit 
and temper pervade the book, and withal what an air 
of summer-day leisure and sequestration ! The great 
world is far off. Its sound is less than the distant 
rumble of a wagon, heard in the midst of the fields. 
The privacy and preoccupation of the author are like 
those of the bird building her nest or of the bee gath- 
ering her sweets. He was eager for news, but it was 
only for news from the earth and the air, or from 
the dumb life about him. Yet it would not be safe 
to affirm that White was not an interested and sym- 
pathetic spectator of the events of his time, like other 
men, for doubtless he was. There is no evidence 
that he was anything like the petulant recluse and 



166 INDOOR STUDIES. 

man-hater that our own Thoreau at times was. He 
had the wide, generous eye, and his love of nature 
was not in any sense a running away from the world. 
But he was not the historian of his time, nor even of 
his own moods and fancies, but the chronicler of the 
unobserved life of nature about him ; and as such he 
attained a pure result. And this is one secret of his 
keeping qualities, — a pure result, untainted and un- 
refracted by any peculiarity of the medium through 
which it came. Mankind, in the long run, cares less 
what you think, unless your plummet goes very deep, 
than what you feel, and are, and experience. White 
valued his facts for what they were, not for any 
double meaning he could wring out of them or any 
airy structure he could build upon them. He loved 
the bird, or the animal, or a walk in the fields, di- 
rectly and for its own sake, and his book makes a 
distinct impression, like any of the creatures or any 
of the phases and products of nature of which it 
treats. The perennial and antiseptic quality in liter- 
ature or art is something as simple as water or milk, 
or as the oxygen of the air ; it does not come from 
afar ; it is more common and familiar than we are 
apt to think. One may not say dogmatically that it 
is this or that, but I think it safe to say that it is in- 
separable from perfect seriousness and singleness of 
purpose. This singleness and seriousness of purpose 
White had. He is as honest and direct as the rain 
or the wind. No levity, no seeing double, no intellec- 
tual astigmatism, no make-believe, no spinning of 



GILBERT WHITE'S BOOK. 167 

webs, hardly any conscious humor, no o'er-ripe senti- 
ment, but a steady effort and puqjose to see and re- 
cord the simple fact. It is not more what he has put 
into his book than what he has kept out of it that has 
made it keep a hundred years. Carlyle says of a cer- 
tain celebrated Frenchman that he was always at the 
top less by power of swimming than by lightness in 
floating. In no disparaging sense is this true of 
White's "Selborne." It has an inherent principle of 
buoyancy like a bird. It is a light book in the best 
sense. It makes no severe demand upon the read- 
er's time or attention. It is as easy reading as the 
letters of a friend. The epistolary form of the chap- 
ters, a form that lends itself so readily, almost inevit- 
ably, to directness and simplicity of statement is no 
doubt one secret of the book's charm. Dullness in 
private letters is perhaps rarer than dullness in any 
other species of writing. Plenty of persons write 
fresh and entertaining letters who are lead itself in 
the essay or the sermon. White is less pleasing in 
his " Observations of Nature " than in his letters. It 
is a great matter to have a fair and definite mark to 
aim at and a good reason for obtruding the personal 
pronoun. White was the type of the true observer. 
He had the alert, open sense, the genial, hospitable 
habit of mind, the healthful objectivity and receptiv- 
ity that at once placed him in right relations with 
outward nature. He had great curiosity and genuine 
enthusiasm, and permitted no moods, or humors, or 
bias, or what not, to stand between him and what he 



168 INDOOR STUDIES. 

saw. His mind transmitted clearly ; the image is 
exact. To be a good observer is not merely to see 
things : it is to see them in their relations and bear- 
ings ; it is to separate one thing from another, the 
wheat from the chaff, the significant from the unim- 
portant. The sagacity of the hound is in his scent, 
the skill of the musician seems in his hands and 
fingers, the mind of the observer is in his eye. To 
untrained perceptions the color of the clouds is this or 
that, gray, or blue, or drab ; the artist picks out the 
primary tints, the separate colors of which this hue is 
composed. In like manner the true observer, the 
true eye-poet or analyst, disentangles the facts and 
threads of meaning of the dumb life about him, and 
gives you a distinct impression. It is true that White 
made a business of observing. For more than forty 
years he went out daily to take note of what was 
going on in his open-air parish. He knew his ground 
by heart, and every new move at once caught his eye. 
If a new bird appeared upon the scene he was sure 
to be on hand to take note of it ; or if a swallow 
lingered a little later than usual or came a day or two 
earlier, the fact did not escape him. The pine gross- 
beak is a rare visitant in England, as it is in the 
United States, yet if one came it was pretty sure to 
report to White at an early day. The hoopoe is also 
a rare bird there ; but one summer a pair took up 
their abode in an ornamental piece of ground that 
joined White's garden. One can imagine how ea- 
gerly he watched them. " They used to march about 



GILBERT WHITE'S BOOK. 169 

in a stately manner," he says, " feeding in the walks 
many times a day, and seemed disposed to breed in 
my outlet, but were frightened and persecuted by 
idle boys, who Avould never let them be at rest." 
The grasshopper-lark is one of the shyest of British 
birds, and one of the most baffling to the observer. 
It creeps around under the thorns and bushes and in 
the bottom of the hedge-rows, like a mouse or a wea- 
sel. Its note or song was thought to proceed from 
a grasshopper ; and White says the country-people 
laugh when told it is a bird. But the sharp-eyed 
curate could not be baffled : he would watch the bird 
till he saw it in the very act. His eye was not only 
quick, it was patient and tenacious, and would not let 
go till it had the secret. He saw the fern-owl feed 
itself while on the wing ; he saw swallows feed their 
young in the air, which few people have perhaps ever 
seen. He timed the white owls that nested under 
the eaves of his church, and, with watch in hand, 
found that one or the other of them returned about 
every five minutes with food for the young. They 
did not proceed directly to the nest, but always 
perched upon the roof of the chancel first. He 
quickly saw what this was for : it was to shift the 
mouse from the claws to the bill, that their feet might 
be free to aid them in climbing to the nest. His ob- 
servation is often of the minutest character. " When 
redstarts shake their tails," he says, "they move 
them horizontally, as dogs do when they fawn ; the 
tail of a wagtail when in motion bobs up and down 



170 INDOOR STUDIES. 

like that of a jaded horse." " Most birds drink sip- 
ping at intervals ; but pigeons take a long continued 
draught, like quadrupeds." When he saw the stilt- 
plover, he observed at once that it had no back toe, 
and must therefore be a bad walker. " Without 
that steady prop to support its steps, it must be liable, 
in speculation, to perpetual vacillations, and seldom 
able to preserve the true centre of gravity." There 
is a sly humorous twinkle in this passage that our 
author seldom indulges in. 

White's interest and curiosity in every phase of 
natural history were so lively and his habit of mind 
was so frank and open that much came in his way to 
record that would otherwise have been passed by. His 
neighbor had a hog which he kept to an advanced 
age, and our curate writes to Mr. Barrington one of 
his characteristic letters about it. " The natural 
term of a hog's life," he begins, " is little known, 
and the reason is plain, — because it is neither profit- 
able nor convenient to keep that turbulent animal to 
the full extent of its time : however, my neighbor, a 
man of substance, who had no occasion to study every 
little advantage to a nicety, kept an half-bred Bantam 
sow, who was as thick as she was long, and whose 
belly swept on the ground, till she was advanced to 
her seventeenth year, at which period she showed 
some tokens of age by the decay of her teeth and 
the decline of her fertility." Two or three of his 
most charming letters are devoted to the " old family 
tortoise." What a clear and vivid impression we get 



GILBERT WHITE'S BOOK. 171 

of the creature ! and what a lively interest we feel 
in his stupid ways ! " No part of his behavior," 
says White, " ever struck me more than the extreme 
timidity it always expresses with regard to rain ; for, 
though it has a shell that would secure it against the 
wheel of a loaded cart, yet does it discover as much 
solicitude about rain as a lady dressed in all her best 
attire, shuffling away on the first sprinklings and 
running its head up in a corner." The old tortoise 
begins to dig a hole in the ground to go into winter 
quarters early in November. " It scrapes out the 
ground with its fore-feet," says the historian, " and 
throws it up over its back with its hind ; but the mo- 
tion of its legs is ridiculously slow, little exceeding 
the hour-hand of a clock." " This creature not only 
goes under the earth from the middle of November 
to the middle of April, but sleeps great part of the 
summer ; for it goes to bed in the longest days at 
four in the afternoon, and often does not stir in the 
morning till late. Besides, it retires to rest for every 
shower, and does not move at all in wet days." 
Though so stupid and sleepy most of the time, " yet 
there is a season of the year (usually the beginning 
of June) when his exertions are remarkable. He 
then walks on tiptoe, and is stirring by five in the 
morning, and, traversing the garden, examines every 
wicket and interstice in the fences, through which he 
will escape if possible, and often has eluded the care 
of the gardener and wandered to some distant field. 
The motives that impel him to undertake these ram- 



172 INDOOR STUDIES. 

bles seem to be of the amorous kind ; his fancy then 
becomes intent on sexual attachments, which trans- 
port him beyond his usual gravity and induce him to 
forget for a time his ordinary solemn deportment." 

Not less graphic and interesting is his account of 
the idiot-boy who had a passion for bees and honey, 
— was, in fact, a veritable bee-eater, seeking the bees 
in the field and about the hives, and as he ran about 
making a humming noise with his lips that resembled 
tbe buzzing of bees. Nothing, in fact, escaped White's 
attention, and his interest in things is so sane and 
natural, and at the same time so lively, that his pages 
never become obsolete. 

The American reader of his book will hardly fail 
to give many of his notes and observations an appli- 
cation at home and see wherein our own familiar 
natural history agrees with or differs from that of 
the mother-country. The toad appears to be a com- 
mon reptile in England, yet White confessed his ig- 
norance of its manner of propagation, — whether it 
laid eggs or brought forth its young alive, — and 
could get no light from the authorities of his time 
upon the subject. But the fact with regard to frogs, 
he said, was notorious to everybody. With us the 
fact with regard to toads is just as obvious. Their 
spawning habits may be noticed in the spring in 
every marsh and road-side pool, the large, sedate, 
grandmotherly female toad bearing the pert, dapper 
little male, looking like her ten-year-old grandson, 
upon her back. It is apparently a copartnership be- 



GILBERT WHITE'S BOOK. 173 

tween a dwarf and a giant. When the female is dis- 
turbed, she plunges to the bottom of the pool and 
buries herself in the mud, carrying the clinging male 
with her, as if he was a very slight appendage indeed. 
The chain of eggs that trails behind, and that may be 
many yards in length, looks like a knitted black yarn 
in a cord of transparent jelly. White says of the 
British frogs that as soon as they have passed out of 
the tadpole state they take to the land, and that at 
times the lanes, paths, and fields swarm with myriads 
of them on their travels. A similar phenomenon 
may be witnessed in this country, except that the tiny 
travelers are toads, and not frogs, and they are not 
migrating, but are out only when it rains, and then 
to wet their jackets. I have never seen them except 
along the highway upon gravelly hills in early sum- 
mer. They are then scarcely as large as bumble-bees. 
White repeatedly speaks of the house - swallow, 
which corresponds to our barn - swallow, as a fine 
songster. In soft, sunny weather, he says, it sings 
both perching and flying. If this is so, it is a point 
in favor of the British bird. Our swallow is not a 
songster ; and yet the epithet which Virgil applies to 
the swallow — garvula — fits our bird. It twitters 
and squeaks and calls ; but is that singing ? Our cliff- 
swallow does the same ; and yet White says the Eng- 
lish martin, or martlet, which is like our bird, is not a 
songster, though it twitters in a pretty, inward, soft 
manner in its nest. Again, the swift, which answers 
to our chimney-swallow, he says, has only a harsh, 



174 INDOOR STUDIES. 

screaming note or two. But our swift has a very 
pretty chippering note or call, which it indulges in 
on the wing and which approaches very nearly to a 
song. On the whole, I conclude from White's ac- 
count that the common European swallow has more 
music in him than ours has, while our swift and mar- 
tin are more musical than the corresponding species 
in that country. There is this marked difference be- 
tween the habits of the birds in the two hemispheres ; 
the swallow that in Europe builds in chimneys, and 
is called the house or chimney-swallow, in this coun- 
try builds in barns and other out-houses, and is called 
the barn-swallow ; while the swift, which builds in 
chimneys here, and uses as material small twigs 
gathered from the tops of dry trees, in England 
builds in crannies of castles and towers and steeples, 
and uses for material dry grasses and feathers, — 
which, however, it seems to gather on the wing, as 
our bird does its twigs. 

White says that birds that build on the ground do 
not make much of their nests, — that is, I suppose, 
are not much attached to them. But this observa- 
tion would not hold in this country. Our song-spar- 
row and field-sparrow, our bobolink, and oven-bird, 
and chewink, and brown thrasher, and Canada war- 
bler, show as strong an attachment for their nests as 
do the tree-builders, and use as many arts to decoy 
the intruder away from them. They build quite as 
elaborate nests, too ; which does not seem to be the 
case with ground-builders in Europe. There are few 



GILBERT WHITE'S BOOK. 175 

finer and neater architects among the birds than our 
song-sparrow and snow-bird. 

White lays it " down as a maxim in ornithology 
that as long as there is any incubation going on there 
is music." This is true of our birds also : they con- 
tinue in song until the young are hatched. But the 
converse of tbe proposition is not true, that there is 
incubation as long as there is music. Certain species 
continue in song long after the last brood has flown. 
I am convinced that more birds continue in song in 
late summer and in early autumn in this country than 
do in England. 

The main features of White's country are appar- 
ently but little changed since his time. The Hanger 
is there, with its noble beeches, and a large part of 
Woolmer Forest still remains. I passed two rainy 
days and one night at Selborne in June, 1 882. At 
the hotel where I stopped a copy of White's book 
could not be produced. The village is small, com- 
pact, and humble. The postman handed me my let- 
ters upon the street without remark, as if I was the 
only stranger in the place, — which was probably 
true. The soil of that part of England is a heavy, 
greasy clay. On the steepest part of the Hanger the 
boys ride or slide down the hill in summer. The 
turf is removed, and the slippery clay is a fair substi- 
tute for ice. White's house had been recently much 
changed. It stands in the midst of the village, close 
to the street, and not amid spacious grounds, as one 
has been led to believe. I looked a long; time for his 



176 INDOOR STUDIES. 

tomb amid the graves that surrounded the old church, 
and finally found a plain slab with " G. W." upon it, 
and that was all. There was no mark that indicated 
that the grave was more frequently visited than any 
other. The church is essentially the same as in 
White's time, and the immense yew that stands near 
the entrance must date back several hundred years. 
The yew is a striking-looking tree. In this country 
the species is represented by a low, reclining bush, 
which reaches out laterally, with but a slight ten- 
dency upward. In England the lateral tendency of 
growth is still very marked, the trunk being short 
and squat, and by its ridgy, corrugated character 
looking more like a bundle or sheaf of smaller trees 
than like a single bole. 

Thus far White stands alone among English writers 
in his field. Much pleasant literature has of late 
years been inspired by nature-studies in Great Brit- 
ain, but the new books have not quite the sweetness 
and charm, not quite the sincerity, of that of the 
Selborne parson. 



A MALFORMED GIANT. 1 

De Quincey somewhere remarks that the Roman 
mind was great in the presence of man, never in the 
presence of nature. I am not going to undertake to 
say whether or not this observation is wholly true. 
Undoubtedly there is truth in it. I remember Gib- 
bons says that to the Romans the ocean was an object 
of terror rather than of curiosity, and that that warlike 
people was never " actuated by the enterprising spirit 
which had prompted the navigators of Tyre, of Car- 
thage, and even of Marseilles to enlarge the bounds of 
the world, and to explore the most remote coasts of the 
ocean." But empire upon the land came easy to the 
Roman. He was great in war, in government, in juris- 
prudence, and in the administration of all human af- 
fairs. 

De Quincey's distinction came to my mind in medi- 
tating upon Victor Hugo. Here, I said, is a great 

1 Perhaps I ought to apologize to my reader for the polem- 
ical tone of the latter part of this essay. It was written 
many years ago in reply to an able critic, the late William D. 
O'Connor, who had resented my epithet of "mad-dog" as 
applied to Victor Hugo's nature, and I find it impossible to 
change it now. As a protest against the glaring vice of 
Hugo's art I think it well enough ; I would only change its 
vehement and controversial tone and temper. 



178 INDOOR STUDIES. 

man, unquestionably a great man, who shows to least 
advantage in his dealings with nature. He seems to 
feel something of the Roman dread and horror in the 
presence of the ocean. Great in dealing with social 
problems, or historical events, great in describing Wa- 
terloo, or the sewers of Paris, or Paris itself, tremen- 
dous in the realism of his characters, in the presence of 
storms or tempests, or of any phase of elemental nature, 
his imagination runs away with him. His nature is 
a kind of mad-dog nature, and the physical universe, 
in his handling of it, seems smitten with hydrophobia. 
The continence, the moderation, the self-denial which 
the Anglo-Saxon temperament loves, and which char- 
acterizes nearly all first-class poets and artists, are 
nowhere to be found. If he mentions the song of the 
skylark, he must call upon the infinite and the immen- 
sities to bear witness. One fully understands what 
Heine means when he speaks of Hugo's "huge and 
tasteless excrescences." Yet it is impossible not to 
feel the man's power even in the poorest translation of 
his books. He is about the only writer of his country 
who impresses one as a man, who rises above the lit- 
erature, whose love of letters is dominated by his love 
of country, his love of man, his love of liberty and 
right, — a fact which makes him a great moral and 
political force aside from his influence in the region of 
letters. There is somewhat aboriginal and elemental 
in him as in all first-class men. The bare concep- 
tion of " The Man who Laughs" is tremendous. Only 
the first order of minds can conjure up such material 



A MALFORMED GIANT. 179 

and deal with such a motif. It is like the granite rock. 
But oh, the absurdities and anachronisms in the 
working of it up ! " The Toilers," too, faces realities 
of the largest kind, but there are things in it which, 
as Robert Louis Stevenson well says, simply make 
the reader cover his face with his hands, the artistic 
falsehoods are so glaring. The description of the 
storm which overtakes Gilliat just as his task is about 
finished resembles the work of the great artists 
about as nearly as a nightmare resembles the reality. 
Yet in all these romances everything is large, 
elemental ; no hair-splitting, nothing petty, or over-re- 
fined. It is the work of a giant, but one malformed. 
Hugo at once strikes a louder, stronger key than any of 
his contemporaries. His voice rises above all others, 
and is as full of cheer and hope as it is full of de- 
nunciation and wrath. He was like dynamite and 
giant powder, which make themselves heard and felt 
afar. He had no repose, and this is one reason why 
he is so irritating to the English mind. Another 
reason is his want of self-restraint. As a literary 
artist he out-Herod s Herod. In the torrent, tempest, 
and whirlwind of his passion, all goes by the board. 
" The modesty of nature," which Hamlet laid such 
stress upon in his address to the players, is not only 
" o'erstepped," it is outrageously insulted. Probably 
never before in the history of literature has a master 
spirit cut such fantastic tricks before the high heaven 
of literary art. He illustrates in his field excesses and 
violences as great as those which have marked the 



180 INDOOR STUDIES. 

history of the French people. His offenses against 
good taste, against one's sense of fitness and propor- 
tion, are, in their way, on a par with the monstrous 
doings of the French Revolution. The writer shocks 
one's artistic perceptions, as the people shock one's 
reason and humanity. And in both cases it was re- 
bellion run mad. The revolt of the people against 
the authority of the state and of the priests became 
frenzy, and the revolt of Hugo against the classic 
standards became rodomontade. He was a romanti- 
cist, which he construed to mean just the contrary of 
the classicist. One law of Greek art and of Greek 
life was, nothing in excess — a wise measure in all 
things ; therefore Hugo piles on the agony ; the 
classic authors were calm, they avoided everything 
sensational, all undue emphasis ; therefore will Hugo 
rave and be sensational ; they cultivated a sobriety 
and temperance which instinctively avoided everything 
that was calculated to weaken an impression ; there- 
fore does the Frenchman give free reign to his rhet- 
oric and ride rough shod over all such tame consid- 
eration. Relevancy, harmony of parts, unity of 
impression — these are some of the excellences of 
the classics, but " Les Miserables," with all its power 
and effectiveness, is like a man with elephantiasis in 
some of his members. When about a third of it is 
cut away the story has some unity. Where the clas- 
sics are dramatic, Hugo is melodramatic — note Gilliat 
in " The Toilers " sitting himself upon the shore to be 
drowned by the tide and his head disappearing under 



A MALFORMED GIANT. 181 

the water at the moment the sloop he is watching 
drops behind the horizon. Where the old writers are 
simple, he is sensational. The Anglo-Saxon mind, 
and every other normal and healthful type of mind, 
is classical in this : it loves proportion, restraint, self- 
denial, and has a lively sense of the fitness of things ; 
does not like any trifling with the centre of gravity 
and keeps close to the simple truth. Let a man fire 
hot shot if he will, but let him keep his own guns 
cool. In nearly all Victor Hugo's political tracts and 
manifestoes the gun is hotter than the shot which it 
throws, and we are more concerned for the writer 
than we are for his enemy. He will spur his earnest- 
ness until it becomes frenzy and his rhetoric until it 
becomes rodomontade. Note his manifesto to the 
Prussians during the siege of Paris. To see him 
rending his flesh, livid with rage and almost foaming 
at the mouth, read certain pages in his "Napoleon 
the Little ; " or to see him again, under a different 
pressure, beating the air wildly and goading his imag- 
ination after his climax is reached, like a rider bury- 
ing his rowel into his steed after the poor beast has 
long done its best, read the concluding parts of his 
description of the battle of Waterloo, or the last 
stages of the storm that overtakes Gilliat in " The 
Toilers," or the threefold agony of the rhetoric of a 
similar description in " The Man who Laughs " (the 
machine that grins, a friend says). To be great in 
the presence of nature, to be great in any presence, is 
to stand firmly on your feet, to use all gently, and in 



182 INDOOR STUDIES. 

the very torrent, tempest, and (as I may say) whirl- 
wind of your passion, acquire and beget a temper- 
ance that will give it smoothness. In the case of 
Victor Hugo, when the pressure of his passion mounts 
to a certain pitch, he invariably flies from his orbit 
and from being planetary, as iEschylus and Shakes- 
peare always are, becomes cometary and lawless, los- 
ing fervor in fury and reason in riot. He would 
have every storm a cyclone, every fish a monster, 
every clown a gnome, a medusa ; and if they are not 
so it is not his fault. He " pushes the passions till the 
bond of nature snaps and all the furies come screech- 
ing in." Let me explain myself further. Close along- 
side of the sphere of the normal lies the sphere of the 
abnormal ; of the sane, lies the insane ; of pleasure, 
lies disgust ; of cohesion, lies dissolution ; of the gro- 
tesque, lies the hideous ; of the sublime, lies the ridicu- 
lous ; of power, lies plethora ; of sense, lies twaddle, 
etc. Take but a step sometimes and you pass from one 
to the other, from a shout to a scream, from the heroic 
to the vainglorious. Victor Hugo, in his imaginative 
flights, is forever hovering about this dividing line, fas- 
cinated, spellbound by what lies beyond, and in his 
Teachings after it outraging the " modesty of nature " 
till the very soul blushes. It would seem as if he loved 
the unnatural simply because it is the unnatural, and 
the malformed simply because it is the malformed. 
He loves to push the normal till it becomes the abnor- 
mal, the dramatic till it becomes the melodramatic, the 
intense till it becomes the hysterical ; he loves to push 



A MALFORMED GIANT. 183 

anger, jealousy, remorse, grief till the bond snaps and 
Termagant is o'erdone. His characters rave, gnash, 
rend their hair, froth at the mouth, and even die in 
paroxysms of passion. No doubt in the opinion of 
Victor Hugoites like Swinburne there is no reason why 
their eyes should not leap from their sockets, thei r 
flesh wither on their bones, or serpents hiss from their 
ears, nose, and mouth, if the " imperial fantasy " of 
the novelist orders it. I am not now thinking of his 
poems, some of which I regard as truly great, but of 
his leading characteristics as a novelist ; of " Bug- 
Jargal " and " Notre Dame." How fares the modesty 
of nature in these volumes ? The former is not so 
well known, but what shall we say of the latter ? Let 
us examine it a little, since this is one of his master- 
pieces. As a work of art what is it a faithful trans- 
script of ? It is full of monstrosities, both moral and 
physical, full of distorted passions, unhallowed lusts, 
fiendish brutality, diabolical ravings, writhing agonies, 
hideous grimaces, sepulchral wailings — full of all 
manner of underground horrors and aboveground 
abominations. It is a carnival of the loathsome. If 
underneath these things, and inclosing them, one rec- 
ognized the great remedial forces of nature, or the 
compensations of time and history, there would be 
some refuge, some escape. But the earth is rotten, 
the sunshine pestiferous, the waters stygian, Paris a 
den of cutthroats and thieves, love is lechery, and re- 
ligion death. This fact alone quashes all minor ex- 
cellence. No work is permissible that flies in the 



184 INDOOR STUDIES. 

teeth of the established order of the universe. It is 
the business of the artist, above all else, to preserve 
the balance of things. Creation is not by one ele- 
ment alone. Fire alone consumes; earth, air, water, 
are also necessary. 

In struggling through the blistering, arid wastes of 
Hysteria that abound in this novel, one remembers 
with profound emotion the silence of Ajax in Hell, 
and sees with Longinius that it was more impressive 
than anything he could have said ; or the soldier of 
Waterloo, who, when asked to surrender in that crater 
of fire and death, could find but one word in which 
to express his scorn and defiance and that a word of 
filth, not permissible in print. (Is there any doubt 
about how the same spirit would greet Hugo's grand 
burst over the circumstance ?) 

The action of the story of " Notre Dame " perhaps 
culminates when the monster Quasimodo defends the 
church of Notre Dame against the midnight assault 
of about six thousand Truancls — the nocturnal hu- 
man vermin of Paris during the Middle Ages — com- 
posed of thieves, harlots, murderers, beggars, gypsies, 
argots — a reeking, fetid, scrofulous, chaotic mass, that 
smelled to heaven. As they surge about the building 
in the darkness, the Hunchback hurls upon them from 
a height of nearly two hundred feet, first a huge 
beam, that spatters them in fragments about ; then 
bricks, stones, rocks, that bury themselves in their 
heads. Finally, not being able to make an impres- 
sion on this nightmare of a mob, he kindles a huge 



A MALFORMED GIANT. 185 

fire in one of the towers and piles upon it sheets of 
lead, and presently two huge gutters vomit upon the 
assailants a shower of molten metal which is repre- 
sented as burning them to cinders. In any less vivid 
imagination than Victor Hugo's, molten lead, after 
running some distance over stone gutters and falling 
one hundred and eighty feet through a cool atmos- 
phere would have resulted in a shower of bullets — to 
say nothing of its burning people to cinders. 

But this is no doubt an instance in which he exer- 
cises the prerogative of his " imperial fantasy." 

In the same assault a mere youth heavily laden 
with armor is represented as bringing with celerity a 
ladder which must have been seventy feet long ; and 
not only carrying it but placing it in position. Quite 
a feat for a mere youth, what indeed ten men could 
not do (allowing that a single ladder of that length 
was ever made, which of course is absurd) but a mere 
straw to the imperial fantasy of Victor Hugo. It 
was the same imperial fantasy no doubt that kept the 
naked feet, to say nothing of his half -clad body, of the 
boy Gwynplaine from freezing in that four or six 
hours' ramble, over the Portland hills through the 
snow and bitter cold, now on the ice, now in the 
water, now floundering through drifts, his rags stiff, 
the icy edges chafing the flesh till the blood comes (?). 
The same fantastic sovereignty causes the cyclone in 
the Northern hemisphere to revolve in the direction 
of the hands of a watch, and sends an unincumbered 
sailor, when he leaps from a sinking wreck to swim 



186 INDOOR STUDIES. 

to a distant rock, several fathoms under water and sets 
him groping around on the submarine ledges before 
he rises to the surface in order that the apochryphal 
devil-fish may get hold of him. 

But to continue the review of " Notre Dame." In 
the concluding chapters of this novel the author in- 
dulges to the utmost his love for the monstrous and 
abnormal exhibitions of the human passions, and there 
is no escape ; not even does the stern visage of Justice 
loom above the scene, or the grander visage of Destiny. 

In the distance a man ascends a ladder to a per- 
manent gibbet, carrying a female figure on his shoul- 
der — a young girl clad in white. The noose is ad- 
justed, the ladder kicked away, and the delicate form 
is launched into the air with the figure of a man 
squatted upon its shoulders. 

At this moment, in the foreground, on one of the 
towers of Notre Dame, a priest who is contemplating 
the scene with outstretched neck, starting eyeballs, and 
livid visage, being driven to the verge of insanity by 
sheer brutal lust for the girl, but thwarted in his de- 
signs by her horror of himself and her love for an- 
other, is suddenly set upon from behind by the en- 
raged Hunchback, who, it seems, is also in love with 
the girl, and precipitated over the balustrade into the 
abyss. But the gutter arrests his fall and he clings 
to it with desperate grip. 

Here Hugo dallies with him and gloats over him. 
He is suspended two hundred feet above the pave- 
ment and cannot long maintain his hold. It is a 



A MALFORMED GIANT. 187 

startling situation, and Hugo loves startling situations. 
He contemplates him panting, perspiring, his nails 
bleeding against the stones, his knees grazing the 
wall, the lead pipe gradually yielding, his strength 
failing, his hands slipping, his vitals freezing, till the 
inevitable moment comes, and he falls through the 
void to the earth beneath. We repeat that there would 
be no objection to all this if it contained food for the 
imagination, if it opened any ideal depths in the mind 
or was relieved by any background ; but excepting 
that the verbal workmanship is vastly better, it ranks 
no higher as art than the blood-and-thunder stories 
of the weekly novelette. 

If a man is drawn into the maelstrom, or falls into 
a volcano, or is lost at sea, or goes down in battle, or 
meets suffering and death in a heroic manner, there is 
room for the imagination to work, but art would have 
little interest in a man being sawed in two, or roasted 
alive, or crushed under a weight, or dangling at the 
end of a rope. If the " Prometheus " of iEschylus 
had nothing to recommend it but the aspect of physi- 
cal torture which it depicts, however vividly painted 
it would at once lose its value as a work of art. 

There is therefore this final remark to be made 
upon the element of the hideous and the monstrous 
that figures so largely in Victor Hugo's novels, and 
that is this : It has little or no artistic value, because 
it has little or no interest to the imagination. When 
employed by the old artists and poets, these things 
are so charged and surcharged with meaning and 



188 INDOOR STUDIES. 

power that the literal import is lost sight of and the 
mind breathes a higher atmosphere. 

Hugo's novels are marked by a feverish preternat- 
ural intensity, not so much good human soul-shaking 
emotion, as a sort of psychological typhoon and hurri- 
cane that means death to every green thing and to 
every sane impulse. I am aware that a microscopi- 
cal examination of his works reveals many fine pas- 
sages, green spots, idylic touches here and there (but 
even in these I can smell the sulphur), but to say they 
are characteristic of him is as absurd as it would be 
to say that humor is characteristic of him because he 
made a " machine that grins." 

The Bishop in " Les Miserables " is perhaps Hugo's 
most serious attempt to paint (for he does not cre- 
ate) a lofty character. And what is the Bishop's at- 
titude toward the All-mother ? " The universe ap- 
peared to him like a vast disease," for aught I know 
as if " smitten with hydrophobia." His tenderness 
toward nature is so excessive as to become silliness. 
" One day he received a sprain rather than crush an 
ant." " One morning he was in his garden and thought 
himself alone ; but his sister was walking behind him ; 
all at once he stopped and looked at something on the 
ground ; it was a large, black, hairy, horrible spider. 
His sister heard him say : ' Poor thing ; it is not his 
fault.' " A galley slave whom he had hospitably fed 
and lodged in his house makes off in the night with his 
silver. In the morning he is walking in the garden 
again, when his " women folks " make the discovery, 



A MALFORMED GIANT. 189 

and raise the alarm, but so far from sharing in the 
surprise, or the indignation which was quite proper 
on the occasion, he thinks only of a little flower that 
the man had crushed in passing out, and bends over it 
with a look of sadness and pity. There may be per- 
sons to whom this sort of thing is impressive and 
grand, but for my part I cannot see how it can ever 
be possible to one having a genuine feeling or ap- 
preciation of nature. 

The mighty poet does not recreate nature in any 
radical sense. He redistributes, re-moulds, re-mar- 
ries, when occasion requires, always bearing in mind 
the almighty edict, " Thus far shalt thou go and no 
farther," and it is the final test and glory of his work 
that though vast and imposing it falls easily within 
the scope of the natural universal. 



BRIEF ESSAYS. 

THE BIOLOGIST'S TREE OF LIFE. 

One of the most helpful and satisfactory concep- 
tions of modern biological science is the conception of 
the animal life of the globe, under the image of a 
tree — a tree which has its root and trunk in the 
remote past and its outermost twigs and branches in 
our own day ; and, moreover, a tree which has at- 
tained its growth, which has reached its maturity, and 
whose history in the far future must be marked by a 
slow decline. This is the Tree of Life of the evolu- 
tionist, and affords the key to the natural classifica- 
tion of the animal kingdom as taught by Darwin and 
others, and as opposed to the artificial or arbitrary 
classification of Cuvier and the older naturalists. 
This tree first emerges into view in the Silurian age, 
probably not less than fifty million years ago, and 
emerges as a pretty well-developed tree, that is, as 
having many branches. Its trunk is beyond our ken, 
hidden in still more remote ages. No fossils have 
been found in rocks older than the Silurian. But if 
evolution is true, it is pretty certain that there must 
have been life on the globe long before that date. 
Our tree must have started as a single shoot, but 
this single stem, our first parent form, has not been 



BRIEF ESSAYS. 191 

found. The biologist is convinced that the very first 
forms of life were soft and very perishable, and that 
therefore no record of them could be preserved in 
the sedimentary rocks. But the later forms, which 
led up to and were the parents of those which emerge 
into view in the Silurian age, must have been capable 
of fossilization. A record of them doubtless exists 
somewhere, and may, in time, be brought to light. 
Darwin thought the record was probably in the rocks 
beneath the sea, as it is certain the sea and the land 
have changed places. Or the record may be in the 
Arctic regions, where some naturalists believe life 
first began, seeing this part of the earth's surface 
would be the first to cool and become of a tempera- 
ture that admitted of animal life. In any case but 
a mere fraction of the record — hardly more than a 
few pages out of many large volumes — is accessible 
and has been subject to scrutiny. The roots and 
trunk of our tree must be assumed to have existed. 
We assume that language began in rude sounds and 
grunts and signs, as we see it begin in a child, though 
of course no record of them could be preserved, and 
that it has developed from these into the marvelous 
structure which we now behold, branching and refin- 
ing and specializing almost endlessly. 

In the Silurian age, then, we strike the top of our 
tree of life. All the great branches are represented, 
all the important classes of animals have made their 
appearance, even the vertebrates being represented in 
the upper Silurian by fishes. Of this tree the sub- 



192 INDOOR STUDIES. 

kingdoms represent the great branches, the classes 
represent their division, the orders, theirs, the family, 
theirs, and so up to species which represent the ter- 
minal twigs. The abundance of specialized forms in 
the Silurian age, that is, the many smaller branches 
that appear, and the absence of two generalized 
forms, or main branches, that must have preceded 
them, is one of the main obstacles in the way of the 
evolution theory, a theory of generic descent; but 
those parent branches, as I have said, are hidden, the 
record of them has not been found, probably never 
can be found. 

It is very certain, not only from direct evidence, 
but in the light of analogy, that the forces of nature, 
vital and other, were much more active in the early 
geologic ages than they are now. It was the youth 
of the world ; why should they not be more active ? 
Why should there not have been more fluids and 
gases and more rapid growths and changes ? There 
was more heat, doubtless more rapid evaporation, 
and more copious precipitation. Our rivers and 
lakes and water-courses are but a fraction of what 
they were in comjjaratively recent geologic times. 
This tree of life grew rapidly in those warm, moist 
May and June days of the Silurian and Devonian 
epochs. New species appeared with comparative 
suddenness ; the life of the globe was full and riot- 
ous. Enormous forms began to appear — flying 
dragons and terrible and grotesque monsters of the 
deep. There was a plethora of jjower, an excess of 
mere animal life. 



BRIEF ESSAYS. 193 

But as the ages rolled on Nature began to sober 
down : her pace became slower and more deliberate, 
and she began to rise on stepping-stones of her dead 
self. The higher forms of life began to appear. 
Birds emerged, mammals came forth. In the Tertiary- 
age the brains of mammals, according to Marsh, be- 
gan to increase in size ; henceforth the struggle was 
not to be one of physical strength merely, but intelli- 
gence began to play a part. The maturity of the 
tree of life was approaching. 

That the geological changes were more rapid in 
the earlier history of the earth than they are now, 
seems to me to admit of no doubt. The forces of 
the globe were more restless and titanic. They had 
not yet attained to the equilibrium and the repose 
that we now see. The crust of the earth was thin- 
ner ; the internal fires were nearer ; the solid ground 
was less solid than that we now walk upon. Volca- 
noes were more active ; earthquakes more frequent. 
The crust of the earth still throbs and palpitates 
under the influence of lunar and solar attraction and 
of unequal atmospheric pressure. Think, then, how 
much more it must have done so, say in the Silurian 
age. The cataclysmal theories of the earlier geolo- 
gists have been much modified by Lyell and his 
school, but so far as they imply greater volume and 
activity in past ages of the physical forces that have 
shaped the earth, they are doubtless true. In the 
Tertiary age these forces became much more gentle 
and uniform in their workings. As changes in the 



194 INDOOR STUDIES. 

earth's surface would be the most powerful factor in 
bringing about changes of species, we see why new 
species seem to have made their appearance so sud- 
denly in early geologic times. 

There can be but little doubt that the earth has at 
last reached the maturity of her powers. She is like 
a ripe apple upon the bough. Henceforth its excel- 
lence must slowly decline. The game of life upon 
this planet has been essentially played. That is, no 
new developments remain, no new species on any 
extended scale, as in the past, are to appear. The 
bird has been evolved from the reptile, but the bird 
is doubtless the top of that branch of our tree of life ; 
no new form is to be evolved from the bird. "We 
know pretty well the descent of the horse ; he has 
arisen through various lower and lesser forms, but 
probably nothing is to come after the horse. The 
same with other forms. No higher form is to suc- 
ceed man, as he has succeeded the lower. Monkeys 
and ourangs are left behind ; they will not give birth 
to a being superior to themselves ; they are twigs 
that have been outstripped by other and more fa- 
vored branches. Man is the last of the series. Su- 
perior races may arise, but not a new and superior 
type of being. And it is very doubtful about the 
superior race ; there are those who believe the race 
culminated in the Greeks over two thousand years 
ago. After the earth has been thoroughly subdued 
and possessed by the dominant races, as it will be in 
a few hundred years more, this topmost branch of 



BRIEF ESSAYS. 195 

the tree will probably begin to fall in vitality and 
fruitfulness. But just what form the decline will 
take can be only a matter of speculation. We only 
know that all things have their periods, and are safe 
in inferring that the life of the globe, as a whole, 
will have its period, just as surely as any tree in the 
forest or any plant in the fields has its period. Why 
should it not be so ? We know any and every single 
form perishes ; why should not the earth itself grow 
old and die ? The life of a man is typical of the life 
of the earth. The stages of an orb's life, says the 
astronomers, are stages of cooling. So are the 
stages of man's life. It is a process of cooling and 
hardening from youth to age. Think of the gaseous, 
nebulous youth out of which the man is gathered and 
consolidated ! Fiery, stormy, vapory, at first, then 
cold, hard, sterile at last. 



DR. JOHNSON AND CARLYLE. 

Glancing at a remark in the London " Times," 
the author of " Obiter Dicta," in his late essay on Dr. 
Johnson, asks : "Is it as plain as the ' old hill of 
Howth,' that Carlyle was a greater man than John- 
son ? Is not the precise contrary the truth ? " There 
are very many people, I imagine, who would be slow 
to admit that the " precise contrary " were the truth ; 
yet it is a question not to be decided off-hand. Both 
were great men, unquestionably, apart from their 



196 INDOOR STUDIES. 

mere literary and scholastic accomplishments. Each 
made a profound impression by virtue of his force of 
character, his weight and authority as a person. As 
to which was the greater moral, or literary, or politi- 
cal force, as embodied in his works, it seems to me 
there can be but one opinion. But the quantity of 
manhood each gave evidence of in his life, and the 
quantity of genius he gave evidence of in his books 
— these of course are two different questions. As 
regards the genius, Carlyle ranks far above Johnson. 

Indeed, the intellectual equipment of the two men, 
and the value of their contributions to literature, ad- 
mit of hardly any comparison. But the question still 
is of the man, not of the writer. Which was the 
greater and more helpful force as a human being ? 
which bore himself the more nobly and victoriously 
through life ? — in short, which was the greater 
man ? Mr. Birrell seems to base his conviction that 
Johnson was the greater, upon the latter's simple res- 
ignation and acceptance of the ills of life : — 

" Johnson was a man of strong passions, unbending 
spirit, violent temper, as poor as a church-mouse and 
as proud as the proudest of church dignitaries ; en- 
dowed with the strength of a coal-heaver, the courage 
of a lion, and the tongue of Dean Swift, he could 
knock down booksellers and silence bargees ; he was 
melancholy almost to madness, ' radically wretched,' 
indolent, blinded, diseased. Poverty was long his 
portion ; not that genteel poverty that is sometimes be- 
hind-hand with its rent, but that hungry poverty that 



BRIEF ESSAYS. 197 

does not know where to look for its dinner. Against 
all these things had this ' old struggler ' to contend ; 
over all these things did this ' old struggler ' prevail. 
Over even the fear of death, the giving up of this 
'intellectual being,' which had haunted his gloomy 
fancy for a lifetime, he seems finally to have prevailed, 
and to have met his end as a brave man should." 

This is excellently said, and is true enough. This 
kind of victory is one test of character certainly, but 
if it is the highest test by which to try a man's claims 
to greatness, then is the world full of silent heroes, 
greater than either Johnson or Carlyle. How many 
men and women receive an avalanche of the ills of 
life upon their heads and shoulders, and die and make 
no sign ! How many nameless " old stragglers " there 
are in nearly every community, who fight a losing 
battle with fortune all their lives, and utter no com- 
plaint ! And it is not always, or commonly, because 
they are made of pure adamant : it is oftener because 
they are stolid and insensible. If stolidity and insen- 
sibility are terms too strong to apply to Johnson, yet 
we must admit there was a kind of dullness and slug- 
gishness about him, which he in vain spurred with 
good resolutions, and which shielded him from the 
acute suffering that Carlyle's almost preternatural ac- 
tivity and sensibility laid him open to. If a man is 
born constitutionally unhappy, as both these men 
seem to have been, his suffering will be in propor- 
tion to the strength and vividness of the imagination ; 
and Carlyle's imagination, compared with Johnson's, 



198 INDOOR STUDIES. 

was like an Arctic night with its streaming and flash- 
ing auroras, compared with the midnight skies of 
Fleet Street 

Carlyle fought a Giant Despair all his life, and 
never for a moment gave an inch of ground. In- 
deed, so far as the upshot of his life was concerned, 
the amount of work actually done, and its value as a 
tonic and a spur to noble endeavor of all kinds, it is 
as if he had fought no Giant Despair at all, but had 
been animated and sustained by the most bright and 
buoyant hopes. The reason of this probably is that 
his gloom and despair did not end in mere negation. 
If he fulminated an Everlasting No, he also fulmi- 
nated an Everlasting Yes. Johnson fought many 
lesser devils, such as moroseness, laziness, irritability 
of temper, gloominess, and tendency to superstition, 
etc. " My reigning sin," he says in his journal, " to 
which perhaps many others are appendant, is a waste 
of time and general sluggishness to which I was al- 
ways inclined and, in part of my life, have been 
almost compelled by morbid melancholy and disturb- 
ance of mind. Melancholy has had in me its par- 
oxysms and remissions, but I have not improved the 
intervals, nor sufficiently resisted my natural inclina- 
tion, or sickly habits." He was always resolving to 
rise at 8 o'clock in the morning, but does not seem 
ever to have been able to keep the resolution. What 
takes one in Johnson is his serious self-reproof and 
the perfect good faith in which he accuses himself 
of idleness, forbidden thoughts, a liking for strong 



BRIEF ESSAYS. 199 

liquors, a shirking of church-going, and kindred sins. 
His sense of duty, and in particular of his duty, 
never slumbered for a moment. On the 21st of 
April, 1764, he got up at three in the morning to 
accuse himself thus : " My indolence since my last 
reception of the Sacrament has sunk into grosser 
sluggishness, and my dissipation spread into wider 
negligence. My thoughts have been clouded with 
sensuality, and, except that from the beginning of 
this year I have in some measure forborne excess of 
strong drink, my appetites have predominated over 
my reason. A kind of strange oblivion has over- 
spread me, so that I know not what has become of 
the last year," etc. This earthiness, these frailties of 
Johnson through which his pious hopes and resolu- 
tions shine so clearly, is a touch of nature which 
makes him kin to all the world. Carlyle does not 
touch us in just this way, because his ills are more 
imaginary and his language more exaggerated. 
"What takes one in Carlyle is the courage and help- 
fulness that underlie his despair, the humility that 
underlies his arrogance, the love and sympathy that 
lie back of his violent objurgations and in a way 
prompt them. He was a man of sorrow, and felt the 
" burthen and the mystery of all this unintelligible 
world " as Johnson never felt it, nor ever could feel 
it. 

Again, Johnson owed much more to his times than 
Carlyle did to his. Both his religion and his politics 
were the religion and the politics of his age and coun- 



200 INDOOR STUDIES. 

try, and they were like ready-made highways along 
which his mind and soul traveled. In comparison 
Carlyle was adrift in the wilderness, where the way 
and the bridges had to be built by himself. What 
gulfs he encountered, what quagmires he floundered 
through ! Johnson " stood by the old formulas," says 
Carlyle ; and adds significantly, " the happier was it 
for him that he could so stand." What would the 
great hulking hypochondriac have done in such a 
world as Cai'lyle traversed, the ground cut clean from 
under him by German thought and modern science, 
awful depths opening where before was solid earth ? 

Johnson has survived his works. Mr. Birrell de- 
clares very emphatically that they are still alive, and 
are likely to remain so ; but the specimens he gives, 
whether of prose or of verse, are not at all reassur- 
ing. But our interest in the man seems likely to be 
perennial. This is probably because he was a much 
greater and more picturesque force personally than 
he was intellectually. His power was of a kind that 
could not fully be brought to bear in literature, that 
is to say, he is greater as a talker in personal encoun- 
ter than in his writings, or in the depth of his thought. 
He said that " no man but a blockhead ever wrote 
except for monejr." But the man who writes for 
money alone, it is pretty sure, will not make a deep 
and lasting impression with his pen. The saying is 
like another one of his — namely, that " a man seldom 
thinks with more earnestness of anything than he does 
of his dinner." When Johnson wrote his famous let- 



BRIEF ESSAYS. 201 

ter to Lord Chesterfield, it is safe to say he did not 
write for money, and that he was thinking of some- 
thing more earnestly than he was wont to think of 
his dinner ; and it is the one piece of his prose that 
is likely to live. But these remarks of his, and oth- 
ers like them — this, for instance, that " great abili- 
ties are not requisite for an historian ; for in histori- 
cal composition all the greatest powers of the human 
mind are quiescent " — such remarks, I say, of 
themselves show his limitations in the direction of 
literature. Johnson lives through Boswell ; without 
Boswell his fame would hardly have reached our 
time, except as a faint tradition. In the pages of 
his biographer the actual man lives for us ; we can 
almost see his great chest heave, and hear the terri- 
ble " Sir ! " with which he held his interlocutor at 
good striking distance. If some Boswell had done 
the same thing for Coleridge, is it probable that he 
would have lived in the same way ? I think not. 
As a personality Coleridge was much less striking 
and impressive than Johnson. As an intellectual 
force he is, of course, much more so. But it is 
hardly possible to feel a deep interest in or admira- 
tion for him on personal grounds alone. 

Is it possible to feel as deep an interest in and ad- 
miration for Carlyle, apart from his works, as we do 
in Johnson ? Different temperaments will answer 
differently. Some people have a natural antipathy to 
Carlyle, based largely, no doubt, on misconception. 
But misconception is much easier in his case than in 



202 INDOOR STUDIES. 

Johnson's. He was more of an exceptional being. 
He was pitched in too high a- key for the ordinary- 
uses of life. He had fewer infirmities than Johnson, 
moral and physical. Johnson was a typical English- 
man, and appeals to us by all the virtues and faults 
of his race. Carlyle stands more isolated, and held 
himself much more aloof from the world. On this 
account, among others, he touches us less nearly. 
Women are almost invariably repelled by Carlyle ; 
they instinctively flee from a certain hard, barren 
masculinity in him. If not a woman-hater, he cer- 
tainly had little in his composition that responded to 
the charms and allurements peculiar to the opposite 
sex ; while Johnson's idea of happiness was to spend 
his life driving briskly in a postchaise with a pretty 
and intelligent woman. Both men had the same 
proud independence, the same fearless gift of speech, 
the same deference to authority or love of obedience. 
In personal presence, the Englishman had the advan- 
tage of mere physical size, breadth, and a stern for- 
bidding countenance. Johnson's power was undoubt- 
edly more of the chest, the stomach, and less of the 
soul, than Carlyle's, and was more of a blind, grop- 
ing, unconscious force ; but of the two men he seems 
the more innocent and child-like. His journal is far 
less interesting and valuable as literature than Car- 
lyle's, but in some way his fervent prayers, his re- 
peated resolutions to do better, to conquer his laziness, 
" to consult the resolve on Tetty's coffin," " to go to 
church," "to drink less strong liquors," " to get up 



BRIEF ESSAYS. 203 

at 8 o'clock," "to reject or expel sensual images and 
idle thoughts," " to read the Scriptures," etc., touch 
one more nearly than Carlyle's exaggerated self-re- 
proaches and loud bemoanings of the miseries of life. 
Yet the fact remains that Johnson lived and moved 
and thought on a lower plane than Carlyle, and that 
he cherished less lofty ideals of life and of duty. It 
is probably true also tbat his presence and his conver- 
sation made less impression on his contemporaries 
than did Carlyle's ; but, through the wonderful Bos- 
well, a livelier, more lovable, and more real image of 
him is likely to go down to succeeding ages than of 
the great Scotchman through his biographer. 

LITTLE SPOONS vs. BIG SPOONS. 

When I was in England, whether in lodgings or in 
a hotel, one of the hardest things to get at table was 
a teaspoon to eat my dessert or sweetmeats with. 
They always brought a dessert spoon, which usually 
seems large and awkward to the American mouth. 
Neither were there any small dishes, such as we have 
at home. They brought you jam, or preserves, or 
strawberries, on a plate as large as a dinner plate. 
This fact would not be worth mentioning, were it not 
characteristic of much one sees there. In England, 
nearly all the arts and appliances of life show, to 
American eyes, a superabundance of material. There 
is more timber and iron in the wagon, more bulk in 
the horse that draws the wagon, and more leather in 



204 INDOOR STUDIES. 

the harness the horse wears. Yes, and more hair in 
the horse's coat. Our domestic animals, our tools, 
our vehicles, our architecture, and our women, look 
trim and slim compared with the English. There is 
probably material enough in an English van to make 
two of our farm wagons. It is a sigbt to behold. It 
looks like a pontoon boat mounted upon huge artil- 
lery wheels. It is usually drawn by three horses, 
tandem, with a boy walking by their side or riding 
the foremost. It would be quite useless in this coun- 
try, as on our poorly made dirt roads it would be a 
load in itself. The running works of the English 
dog-cart, a pleasure vehicle, would be considered 
nearly heavy enough for a light farm cart in this 
country. Easy roads and heavy vehicles are the rule 
in England, and poor roads and light vehicles with 
us. John Bull would hardly trust himself in our 
cobweb " buggies ; " certainly not upon our outlandish 
roads. He does not know the virtues of hickory, a 
tree native to this country. Hickory gives us the 
most strength with the least bulk, and this is no 
doubt one reason of the lightness and slenderness of 
our tools and vehicles. Compare an English ax with 
an American ax ; how crude and awkward the for- 
mer looks beside the latter ; how shapely our tool is ! 
Our tools suggest a more deft and supple and a 
lighter race. The tendency in us to pare down and 
cut away every superfluous ounce is very marked. 
We are great whittlers. Have we not whittled away at 
the hulls of our ships until we have made the swiftest 
sailing vessels in the world ? 



BRIEF ESSAYS. 205 

The English, in most things, seem to like the look 
of mass and strength ; we like best the look of light- 
ness and speed. Even the type in which their books, 
newspapers, and magazines are printed, is larger than 
the type in which ours are printed. Indeed, it would 
seem as if there was not room enough in our great 
country for generous-sized type. English houses and 
buildings all have a look of greater solidity than 
ours ; their walls are thicker, their tiles heavier. 
"What would they think of our balloon frames over 
there ? What would our grandfathers think of them ? 
Dickens said the houses in this country looked as if 
made of pasteboard. 

This lightness and airiness is becoming a fixed 
national trait, and is in keeping with the general ten- 
dency of all natural forms in this country. Nearly 
all organic growths here show greater refinement of 
form than in the British Isles. Our wild flowers are 
more graceful and delicate. Our climbing plants, the 
foliage of our trees, the trees themselves, our grasses 
and wild weedy growths, are all more slender and 
fluent in form than the corresponding English species. 
English trees, English groves, have a wonderful ex- 
pression of solidity and repose. The leaves are larger 
and stiffer, and adjust themselves with more ease to 
the fainter light. Even the British bumble-bee is a 
coarser and more hairy creature than ours, and the 
fox and the squirrel, as well as the domestic animals, 
are less sleek and trim than with us. Our bright, 
sharp climate has its effect upon all things, but it is 



206 INDOOR STUDIES. 

only up to a certain point that this effect is matter 
for congratulation. All European forms are refined 
here, but presently there is danger that they may 
become attenuated and weakened. The children of 
European parents born here — Irish, English, Ger- 
man — are, as a rule, much more shapely and clear 
cut in feature than when born in the same rank of 
life in Europe. But they are less robust and virile, 
especially the girls ; while, probably, the next genera- 
tion will be still less so. Here comes in the set-back. 
What appears to be the most serious danger now 
threatening the American race is just this tendency to 
■ over-refinement, and the consequent failure in repro- 
duction. 

This tendency has set its stamp upon our mentality, 
so that our literary and scientific works, and all the 
varied outcomes of our mental life, are characterized 
by clearness, quickness, aptness, rather than by force, 
or depth, or real mastery. Our literature, as such, 
has less bulk than the English or German, less body 
and more grace and refinement. Compare Emerson 
with Carlyle, or Fiske with Spencer, or Hawthorne 
with Scott, or Prescott with Macaulay, or Howells 
with George Eliot. Up to a certain point this deft- 
ness and clearness of our authors gives them the 
advantage ; but when great tasks are to be under- 
taken, our lightness and brightness are less telling. 
Our second considerable crop of authors, born (say) 
since 1825, has less force, less body, less breadth, than 
our first great crop, which included Cooper, Bryant, 



BRIEF ESSAYS. 207 

Irving, Emerson, Longfellow, Whittier, etc. There 
are things in Stedman that have the old hreadth and 
generosity, but there are not enough of them. It 
seems to me that we are refining now at the expense 
of strength. Our poets and critics, like our " bug- 
gies " and pleasure vehicles, lack timber, lack mass. 
Our popular novelists have point but lack body. 
The workmanship is admirable, but the material upon 
which it is expended is abominable. What a boon 
to them would be a little of Scott's, or Dickens's power 
and heartiness, or of Turgenef's grasp of the fun- 
damental human qualities ! The men and women 
turned out are by no means the equal of those one 
meets daily among all ranks of the people, except 
perhaps in the single qualities of wit and " smart- 
ness." The rank, primary, inarticulate human qual- 
ities are suffering decay among us ; there can be 
little doubt of that. Probably they are suffering — 
or are threatened with — the same decay in Europe. 
A cheap press, much and hasty reading, rapid com- 
munication, tend to give us surface dominion, with- 
out corresponding depth. 

Yet, as contrasted with the American, the English- 
man reaps great advantage in his greater stolidity, 
inertia, mass, depth of character, because these things 
make a solid ground to build upon, and when faculty 
and insight are added, they give that weight and 
force which have made the English race what it is. 
There is one notable exception in our later literature 
to this American tendency to over-refinement of form, 



208 INDOOR STUDIES. 

which I am not likely to forget ; and that is fur- 
nished hy Walt Whitman. Mass and strength, and 
all the primary qualities of both body and mind, are 
fully attended to by him. Probably this, more than 
anything else, is the reason why his poems are so dis- 
tasteful to the majority of his countrymen, and why 
his reception abroad has been more cordial than at 
home. It is, at any rate, the ground upon which his 
appearance in our literature has always been regarded 
by myself as so suggestive and so welcome. 

THE ETHICS OF WAR. 

Why it is that we look so much more compla- 
cently upon war, upon a fight between two nations, 
than we do upon a fight between two individuals. If 
my neighbor and I have a difficulty or a misunder- 
standing and proceed to settle it with clubs, or pis- 
tols, or with our fists, in the opinion of all decent 
people we behave shamefully, wickedly, and reduce 
ourselves to a level with the brutes. But when na- 
tions settle their difficulties by an appeal to arms, and 
thousands upon thousands of lives are sacrificed, and 
millions upon millions of treasure squandered, we take 
quite a different view of the matter. We may say 
" What a pity ! " or " How unwise ! " but we do not 
experience the same feeling of contempt and disgust 
that we do in the case of personal encounters brought 
about by like provocation. If two men of rival trades 
or interests come into collision, and the victor robs 



BRIEF ESSAYS. 209 

the other of his purse to indemnify himself for his 
scratches and bruises and torn clothes, he would at 
once forfeit any sympathy and respect which the just- 
ness of his cause might have inspired in the specta- 
tors. Instead of a hero we should look upon him as 
a robber. Yet Germany beats France in battle and 
indemnifies herself for her bruises and torn clothes 
by a large slice of French territory and many mil- 
lions of French treasure, and we do not feel that she 
has sacrificed her honor. Does might make right be- 
tween nations, while the principle will not hold good 
at all as between individuals ? 

It is certainly true that we do not apply the same 
standard of morality in the one case that we do in 
the other, certainly true that we do not look for the 
same acts of generosity or magnanimity between 
nations that we expect to be shown between neigh- 
bors. Nations are invariably selfish, and they are 
rarely as honest as their individual citizens. Legis- 
lative bodies have deliberately done things, or re- 
frained from doing things, that the individual mem- 
bers composing them would blush to be found guilty 
of. What meanness, narrowness, selfishness has not 
England been guilty of ? and yet the individual 
Englishman is by no means insensible to the obliga- 
tions of truth and fair play. States and communi- 
ties in this country have repudiated their honest 
debts in a way that would have ruined the standing 
of any business man in them had he resorted to the 
same trick to defraud his creditors. The American 



210 INDOOR STUDIES. 

Congress had for more than fifty years behaved in 
the most shameful and dishonest manner in refusing 
to authorize the payment of the French spoliation 
claims. The precepts of religion have had little or 
no influence upon the policy of nations. Love your 
neighbor as yourself ; do to others as you would that 
others should do unto you ; think no evil, etc. ; what 
should we think if governments acted upon these 
principles ? Is the nation, then, a remnant of bar- 
barism that the moral law should not apply to it ? 
that religion should not affect it ? 

It is because nations are not as civilized as individ- 
uals, and, probably, never will be, that war is still 
possible. The nation is still the tribe, and the tribal 
instincts for self-preservation are still active ; tribal 
jealousies and animosities are still easily kindled. 
Our admiration for war is the same as our admira- 
tion for the virtues of the stern heroic ages — cour- 
age, self-sacrifice, contempt of death, personal prow- 
ess, great leadership. The nation, as such, still rests 
upon these qualities. Genius and power always take 
us, and war is a great field for the display of genius 
and power. 

All readers of " Sartor Resartus " will remember 
the striking, though not quite just, light in which 
Carlyle sets war : — 

" What, speaking in quite unofficial language, is 
the net purpose and upshot of war ? To my own 
knowledge, for example, there dwell and toil in the 
British village of Dumdrudge usually some five hun- 



BRIEF ESSAYS. 211 

dred souls. From these, by certain natural enemies 
of the French, there are successively selected during 
the French war, say thirty able-bodied men. Dum- 
drudge, at her own expense, has suckled and nursed 
them ; she has, not without difficulty and sorrow, fed 
them up to manhood, and even trained them to 
crafts, so that one can weave, another build, another 
hammer, and the weakest can stand under thirty 
stone avoirdupois. Nevertheless, amid much weep- 
ing and swearing, they are selected ; all dressed in 
red, and shipped away on the public charges some 
two thousand miles, or say only to the south of 
Spain ; and fed there till wanted. And now to that 
same spot in the south of Spain are thirty similar 
French artisans, from a French Dumdrudge, in like 
manner wending ; till at length, after infinite effort, 
the two parties come into actual juxtaposition ; and 
thirty stands fronting thirty, each with a gun in his 
hand. Straightway the word ' Fire ! ' is given ; and 
they blow the souls out of one another ; and in place 
of sixty brisk useful craftsmen, the world has sixty 
dead carcasses which it must bury and anew shed 
tears for. Had these men any quarrel ? Busy as 
the devil is, not the smallest ! They lived far 
enough apart ; were the entirest strangers ; nay, in 
so wide a universe, there was even, unconsciously, by 
Commerce, some mutual helpfulness between them. 
How then ? Simpleton ! their Governors had fallen 
out ; and, instead of shooting one another, had the 
cunning to make these poor blockheads shoot." 



212 INDOOR STUDIES. 

This is very witty, but is it a true picture of mod- 
ern war ? The Governors of these sixty men had 
not fallen out ; they had no personal quarrel ; they 
may even have had a warm feeling of friendship for 
each other ; it was in their representative capacities 
that they had a quarrel ; the two nations quarreled 
through them, and it is fit the two nations should 
send men to fight it out, and that the Governors 
themselves should keep out of harm's way. It is the 
narrow feeling of patriotism, of sectionalism, and 
race prejudices that make wars possible. The Euro- 
pean nations are jealous and suspicious of each other, 
like African tribes. Did they all form one federa- 
tion, and see that the best interests of one were in 
the end the best interests of all, war between them 
would be impossible. 

Our admiration for war, then, is a mixed feeling, in 
some of its elements laudable, in others questionable. 
Our love of the heroic overrides our humanitarian 
feelings ; our attraction for power blunts our sense 
of right. If a man steals a chicken we hold him in 
contempt, but if he steals a railroad, we feel quite 
differently toward him. Anybody can rob a hen- 
roost, but it requires a genius and capacity to steal 
a great corporate interest. But there are grounds 
upon which our admiration for war is laudable. In 
the first place war is not personal, as a quarrel be- 
tween individuals is ; the personal feelings of anger, 
hatred, etc., which brutalize men in personal con- 
flicts, are not appealed to. It is a school of disci- 



BRIEF ESSAYS. 213 

pllne in all the more manly and heroic virtues. It 
begets courage, coolness, self-control. It is a great 
game between great forces, in which the clearest and 
longest heads win. It fosters patriotism and the 
feeling of nationality. It is said of certain African 
tribes that those that are the most warlike as nations 
are the least so as individuals, and vice versa. Quar- 
relsome and vindictive men do not make good sol- 
diers. The most peaceable and high-minded make 
the best. The more brutal qualities that seek per- 
sonal encounter are not the qualities that inspire a 
great soldiery. It is not an encounter between men 
wherein one seeks in a passion of anger to overthrow 
the other and aggrandize himself ; it is a collision of 
the great forces that rule men. Moral force does as 
much, or more, than physical force. The great pas- 
sion or inspiration of heroism has play ; men are 
called on to face great odds ; they are called upon to 
offer their lives for others. Men who lead a charge 
and do not flinch or turn back have achieved the 
noblest victory over themselves, whether they break 
the enemy or not. The element of destiny comes in. 
Large bodies of men are subject to laws and condi- 
tions that touch not the individual. Their wrath is 
not as the wrath of a man ; their blood-shedding is 
not as the crime of a person. So many elements 
enter into a great battle beside the personal element ; 
all the forces of nature take part. It often happened 
in the ancient wars that the army was defeated that 
had the sun in its eyes. Often some false rumor, 



214 INDOOR STUDIES. 

some accidental cry, turns the tide. The morale of 
an army is everything — faith in their general and 
in the justness of their cause — there are no rein- 
forcements like these. Indeed, every impulse that 
is manly and noble and elevating tells tremendously 
in war. 

These are perhaps some of the considerations that 
lead us to judge war between nations by a different 
standard from the one we apj)ly to individual encoun- 
ters. It has not the demoralizing element of base 
anger. There must be something that vastly more 
than offsets the brutal element in it, else the good 
could never have flowed from it that we know has 
flowed. Men who settle their differences by blows 
and blood are always the worse for it. But nations 
are often the better for it. It sets new and larger 
currents going. The nation is above the individual, 
and the national life is often cemented and strength- 
ened by the blood of the best citizens. 

SOLITUDE. 

Emerson says, " Now and then a man exquisitely 
made can live alone, and must ; but coop up most men 
and you undo them." Solitude tries a man in a way 
society does not; it throws him upon his own re- 
sources and if these resources be meagre, if the 
ground he occupies in and of himself be poor and 
narrow he will have a sorry time of it. Hence we 
readily attributed some extra virtue to those persons 



BRIEF ESSAYS. 215 

who voluntarily embrace solitude, who live alone in 
the country or in the woods, or in the mountains, and 
find life sweet. We know they cannot live without 
converse, without society of some sort, and we credit 
them with the power of invoking it from themselves, 
or else of finding more companionship with dumb 
things than ordinary mortals. In any case they give 
evidence of resources which all do not possess. If 
not " exquisitely made," hermits generally have a fine 
streak in them, which preserves them in solitude. If 
a man wants to get away from himself or from a 
guilty conscience he does not retreat into the country, 
he flees to the town. If he is empty, the town will 
fill him ; if he is idle, the town will amuse him ; if he 
is vain, here is a field for his vanity ; if he is ambi- 
tious, here are dupes waiting to be played upon ; but 
if he is an honest man, here he will have a struggle 
to preserve his integrity. The rapid growth of cities 
in our time, has its dark side. Every man who has 
a demon to flee from, a vice to indulge, an itching for 
notoriety to allay, money to squander, or a dream of 
sudden wealth to cherish, flees to the city, and as 
most persons have one or the other of these things, 
the city outstrips the country. It is thought that 
the more a man is civilized, the more his tastes are 
refined, the more he will crave city life and the more 
benefit he will get from it. But this may be ques- 
tioned. It is not as a rule a refined taste that takes 
men to cities, but a craving for a vain superficial ele- 
gance, the pride of dress, of equipage, of fashion, of 



216 INDOOR STUDIES. 

fast living, and the shams and follies of the world. 
The more simple and refined taste loves the serious- 
ness and sobriety of the country. 

People find country life dull because they are 
empty and frivolous ; having only themselves on their 
hands they can extract no entertainment from such a 
subject. How can a man profitably commune with 
himself, if the self is small and frivolous and un- 
worthy ? He will not go to his own garden for fruit 
if there be only thorns there. 

The finest spirits are not gregarious ; they do not 
love a crowd. Crows and wolves go in flocks and 
packs, but the eagle and the lion are solitary in their 
habits. 

Solitude is not for the young ; the young have no 
thoughts, or experience, but only unsatisfied desires ; 
it is for the middle-aged and the old, for a man when 
he has ripened and wants time to mellow his thoughts. 
A man who retires into solitude must have a capital 
of thought and experience to live upon, or his soul 
will perish of want. This capital must be reinvested 
in the things about him or it will not suffice. Either 
as a farmer or as a student and lover of nature, or 
as both, can he live as it were on the interest of his 
stored up wisdom. 

" There are things that never show themselves till 
you are alone," said an old recluse in Mexico to an 
American traveler, who had claimed the hospitality 
of his hut, " but if you once make up your mind that 
there is no harm in them, you find out that they are 



BRIEF ESSAYS. 217 

pretty good company." The old recluse knew what 
he was saying. Things do show themselves when one 
is alone ; they emerge on all sides ; they come in 
troops from all points of the compass, and one is only 
master of the situation when he can make good com- 
pany of them. How your misdeeds find you out ; 
the still small voice of conscience, which you could 
not hear amid the roar of the town, makes itself heard 
now; all the past beleaguers you, whether with an 
army of angels or of demons, depends upon what 
your past has been. 

The old recluse above referred to, the traveler 
found living in a hut alone in the mountains. He 
had lived there many years, with no companionship 
but his dogs. An Irishman by birth, he had tried 
many parts of the world, and seen many phases of 
life, and had at last found his place in the solitude of 
the Mexican mountains. He had learned the art of 
dreaming with his eyes open, which is the charm of sol- 
itude. A man who cannot dream with his eyes open 
had better not court solitude. Such an old dreamer 
was found the other day by some railroad surveyors on 
a mountain in North Carolina. He had lived there in 
his hut for fifty years. He, too, had for companion 
a dog. If Thoreau had made friends with a dog to 
share his bed and board in his retreat by Walden Pond, 
one would have had more faith in his sincerity. The 
dog would have been the seal and authentication of 
his retreat. A man who has no heart for a dog, how 
can he have a heart for nature herself ? For many rea- 



218 INDOOR STUDIES. 

sons women seldom voluntarily face solitude, but in my 
boyhood, I knew an aged widow who lived all alone 
on her little farm, in her little brown house, for many 
years. She kept five or six cows which she took care 
of herself winter and summer. She hired her hay gath- 
ered, her wood cut, and that was all. She was a gentle 
and pious little woman and her house was as neat as 
a pin. But think of those long years of solitary life ; 
the nights, the mornings, the meals, the Sundays, the 
week days, and no sound but what you made yourself ! 
How intimately acquainted with one's self one must 
become in such a life ? If one's self was not a pretty 
good fellow, how cordially one would learn to dislike 
his company. One Sunday, as my people were passing 
the house on their way to church, they saw her wash- 
ing. " Hello, Aunt Debby ! don't you know it is Sun- 
day ? " Behold the consternation of the old dame. 
She had lost her reckoning and had kept Sabbath on 
Saturday. The last time I passed that way I saw 
only a little grassy mound where Aunt Debby's 
house used to stand. 

The poet of solitude is Wordsworth. What a sense 
of the privacy of fields and woods there is over all 
his poetry ; what stillness, what lonesome dells, what 
sounds of distant water-falls ! How fondly he lingers 
upon the simple objects of nature, upon rural scenes 
and events, and how perpetually he returns upon his 
own heart ! His companionship with hills and trees 
and rocks and shepherds does not relieve, but rather 
sets off his loneliness. He is encompassed with soli- 
tude wherever he goes. 



BRIEF ESSAYS. 219 

" In November days, 
When vapors rolling' down the valley make 
A lonely scene more lonesome ; among woods 
At noon ; and mid the calm of summer nights, 
When by the margin of the trembling lake, 
Beneath the gloomy hills, I homeward went 
In solitude." 

And has the same sweet and fruitful fellowship with 
nature and with his own heart. In his " A Poet's 
Epitaph," he has drawn his own portrait : — 

" He is retired as noontide dew, 

Or fountain in a noonday grove ; 
And you must love him, ere to you 
He will seem worthy of your love. 

" The outward shows of sky and earth, 
Of hill and valley, he has viewed ; 
And impulses of a deeper birth 
Have come to him in solitude. 

" In common things that round us lie 
Some random truths he can impart ; 
The harvest of a quiet eye 

That broods and sleeps on his own heart." 

"Wordsworth was solitary because of his profound 
seriousness and because great thoughts or deep emo- 
tions always create a solitude of their own. What is 
communing with nature but communing with our- 
selves ? Nature gives back our thoughts and feelings, 
as we see our faces reflected in a pool. Wordsworth 
found himself whenever he walked ; all nature was 



220 INDOOR STUDIES. 

Wordsworthian. Another man of equal profundity 
and sympathy finds nature stamped with his image. 

Wordsworth felt akin to all solitary things ; he is 
drawn hy every recluse and wanderer ; he loves to 
contemplate heggars, and dwellers or watchers in se- 
cluded dells, and to sing the praises of " The Solitary 
Reaper." A solitary flower, a solitary scene of al- 
most any kind never failed to move him. What a 
charm of seclusion in the poem beginning, — 

' ' I wandered lonely as a cloud 
That floats on high o'er vales and hills." 

or in this other, — 

" I heard a thousand blended notes 
While in a grove I sat reclined 
In that sweet mood where pleasant thoughts 
Bring sad thoughts to the mind." 

or again in this immortal song, — 

" She dwelt among the untrodden ways, 
Beside the springs of Dove, 
A maiden whom there were none to praise 
And very few to love ; 

" A violet hy a mossy stone 
Half hidden from the eye ; 
Fair as a star when only one 
Is shining in the sky." 

Before Wordsworth solitude had a lover and poet 
in Abraham Cowley. Through nearly all his essays 
there runs a desire to escape from the world and to 



BRIEF ESSAYS. 221 

be alone with nature and with his own thoughts. 
And who has better expressed this desire and the sat- 
isfaction which its fulfillment brings ? He longed for 
the country as an exile longs for home. He says to 
Evelyn that he had never had any other desire so 
strong and so like to covetousness as the one he had 
always had, namely, to be master at last of a small 
house and a large garden with very moderate conven- 
iences joined to them, and there to dedicate the re- 
mainder of his life only to the culture of them and 
to the study of nature. 

He says, " As far as my memory can return back 
into my past life, before I knew or was capable of 
guessing what the world, or the glories or business of 
it were, the natural affections of my soul gave me a 
secret bent of aversion from them." When he was a 
boy at school he was wont to leave his play-fellows, 
and walk alone into the fields. How charmingly he 
praises " Obscurity," and how pungently he sets forth 
the " Dangers of an honest man in much company." 

He knew well the virtues which solitude necessi- 
tated and implied. 

" The truth of the matter is, that neither he who is 
a fop in the world is a fit man to be alone ; nor he 
who has set his heart much upon the world, though 
he have never so much understanding ; so that soli- 
tude can be well fitted and sit right but upon a very 
few persons. They must have enough knowledge of 
the world to see the vanity of it, and enough virtue 
to despise all vanity ; if the mind be possessed with 



222 INDOOR STUDIES. 

any lust or passion, a man had better be in a fair 
than in a wood alone." 

But after all has been said about the solitude of na- 
ture, that is the best solitude that comes clothed in the 
human form, your friend, your other self, who leaves 
you alone, yet cheers you, who peoples your house or 
your field and wood with tender remembrances, who 
stands between your yearning heart and the great 
outward void that you try in vain to warm and fill, 
who in his own person and spirit clothes for you and 
endows with tangible form, all the attractions and 
subtle relations and meanings that draw you to the 
woods and fields. What the brooks and the trees 
and the birds said so faintly and vaguely, he speaks 
with warmth and directness. Indeed your friend 
compliments and completes your solitude and you ex- 
perience its charm without its desolation. I cannot 
therefore agree with Marvell that 

" Two paradises are in one, 
To live in paradise alone." 
I should want at least my friend to share it with me. 

AN OPEN DOOR. 

How the revelations of science do break in upon 
the sort of private and domestic view of the universe 
which mankind have so long held. To many minds 
it is like being fairly turned out into the cold, and 
made to face without shield or shelter the eternities 
and the infinities of geologic time and sidereal space. 



BRIEF ESSAYS. 223 

We are no longer cozily housed in pretty little an- 
thropomorphic views of things. The universe is no 
longer a theatre constructed expressly for the drama 
of man's life and salvation. The race of man be- 
comes the mere ephemera of an hour, like insects of 
a summer day. In an hour of the summer of the 
earth's geologic history he appears, and in an hour 
he is gone ; a few hours more and all is gone, and 
the earth itself is frozen into the everlasting death 
and night of the winter of the solar system. Science 
says in just so many words, " there is no reason to 
deny the final cessation of the sun's activity, and the 
consequent death of the system." 

Our hearts, our affections, all our peculiarly human 
attributes draw back from many of the deductions of 
science. We feel the cosmic chill. We cannot warm 
or fill the great void. The universe seems orphaned. 
This is the reason why many people who accept sci- 
ence with their understanding, still repudiate it in 
their hearts ; the religious beliefs of their youth still 
meet a want of their natures. 

It makes a great difference whether we look upon 
things from the point of view of our personal wants 
and needs, or from the point of view of reason. It 
takes mankind, as it takes every individual man, a 
long and hard struggle to break away from the 
former standpoint, and to gain the mountain top im- 
plied in the latter. When I look upon the sun from 
my place and surroundings he seems to be a mere 
appurtenance of the earth. How he seems to attend 



224 INDOOR STUDIES. 

us, and to swing around us to give light and warmth. 
How immense seems the earth ; how small, compara- 
tively, the sun. See him setting behind the hills or 
riding up out of the wave. Xenophanes, according 
to Plutarch, thought the earth had many suns and 
many moons. An eclipse of the sun, he said, hap- 
pened when the orb of the sun, falling upon some 
part of the world which is uninhabited, wandered in 
a vacuum and became eclipsed. Herodotus also 
looked upon the sun as something thus special to the 
earth. On the approach of winter, he says, he grows 
feeble, and retreats to the south, because he can no 
longer face the cold and the storms of the north. 
One is reminded of these things when he sees the 
good people appropriate God to themselves in a way 
they are perpetually doing. What a special interest 
He takes in their lives. Their well being or their ill 
being seems his main concern. All the early races 
— the Bible races — do this. How the old Hebrews 
claimed God. He was the Lord God of Israel and 
of no one else. How imminent, how personal He is 
in their Scriptures ; how cruel, how terrible, how 
jealous — a magnified and heaven-filling despot and 
king. All the good old pious people still refer the 
events of their daily lives to Providence. Indeed, 
the popular conception of God is still essentially 
Ptolemaic. Our religion is built upon the notion that 
man and man's life are the objects of his especial 
care and solicitude. And so they are, but not just 
in the way we are so fond of thinking. 



BRIEF ESSAYS. 225 

Astronomers figure out for us the infinitesimal frac- 
tion of the sun's light which our earth intercepts in 
the infinite void ; in the same way and to the same 
extent does the providence of God transcend not only 
the wants of our little lives, but the life of the globe 
itself. Yet each and all get enough. The sun seems 
near to us — is near by its power. The light that 
floods our houses, that shines upon our fields ; how 
potent it is. What marvelous transformations it 
works ! If the sun did, indeed, shine for this world 
alone, and was only just there behind the horizon as 
it seems, we could not be better looked after. 

To all intents and purposes, God is and exists for 
each one of us alone. His providence is exemplified 
in every movement of our lives. Out of the abuse 
of this feeling or faith comes our arrogating to our- 
selves special providences, special interference in our 
petty affairs. But until the sun does shoot some spe- 
cial ray for you, and the attraction of gravity make 
some exception in your favor, count not upon God's 
doing so. Our very life, the beating of our very 
hearts depend upon the sun, not because the sun is 
special, but because the sun is universal ; not because 
it is adjusted and adapted to us, but because we are 
adjusted and adapted to it. Its bounty and power 
extend in every direction alike ; it shoots into the 
void myriads of rays as vivifying as those that make 
our blood flow. The same with this power we call 
God. In it we live and move and have our being, 
but it is not an attendant of our lives ; we are an 



226 INDOOR STUDIES. 

accident of it ; it is imminent to us, because it is im- 
minent everywhere. Light was not made for the 
eye, but we have eyes because there is light. The 
outward world is not accommodated to us, but vice 
versa. There are no special acts of Providence that 
have reference to you and to me, to this or to that 
event of our lives, any more than the North Star was 
placed there for the guidance of mariners or that 
anything in nature was made for the use of man. 
Was water made to quench thirst ? No ; Ave have 
thirst because there is water. Were the beauties and 
harmonies of nature made to delight our senses or 
for our edification ? No ; we have the sense of the 
beautiful because beauty exists. The beneficent forces 
of nature brought us forth and sustain us, therefore 
we love beneficence. The loving kindness and the 
tender mercies of God, of which we hear so much, 
are such not because they are directed to us, but be- 
cause they are directed to all, because the laws of the 
universe are so, and not otherwise. God answers 
prayer, not by a particular providence, but by a gen- 
eral providence. You may light your fire by focus- 
ing the sun's rays with a burning-glass ; but the rays 
are no different ; they are the same as those that are 
shot into space on all sides at all times. Still, Provi- 
dence is imminent in human affairs, not by special 
acts, but by universal, eternal, unceasing acts. Does 
it rain to make things grow and to fill our wells and 
cisterns ? We are apt to take this view of things, 
but I noticed that it rained at sea the same as upon 



BRIEF ESSAYS. 227 

the land. Men and nations at war with each other, 
each seeking to slay or overthrow the other, pray to 
the same God for victory. And God helps one just 
as much as He helps the other, not by special provi- 
dences, hut by general providences, like the rain or 
snow, or light or gravitation. His laws prevail, and 
whoso obeys them (his will) best triumphs ; God 
gives him the victory. I notice that when the chil- 
dren of Israel are defeated, or suffer any disaster, 
God is always against them, but when they triumph 
it is God who gives the victory, and it is all true in a 
strict scientific sense. 

A clergyman on the wrecked train thanked God 
most fervently that the train did not go into the 
river. It was clearly the hand of Providence that 
saved them, he said. One would have thought that 
if God had interested himself at all in the incident 
He would have interested himself to have prevented 
it. If not we must either suppose He was unable to 
prevent it, or else unwilling, and either horn of the 
dilemma is a bad horn. At New Hamburg a few 
years ago, when a passenger train ran into an oil 
train and hundreds of people perished, He seems to 
have taken no hand at all in the matter. Why should 
He save this crowd and not that ? Or the Ashtabula 
horror — where was God then ? Hiding from the 
disaster He might have averted ? Ah ! me, as soon 
as we make God out to be a person who interferes 
in the events of this world, into what straits are we 
forced ? We are forced to conclude either that He 



228 INDOOR STUDIES. 

is not omnipotent or else that He is a monster of 
cruelty — that He is capricious and changeable, or 
an ogre that delights in human suffering and blood. 
I know the well-known text we take shelter under — 
the ways of Providence are past finding out ; but 
that is begging the question. You presume to know 
them and to have found them out when you say He 
chose to throw the train on the upper side of the 
track instead of on the lower. No, He is not that 
kind of a God. The only way He interferes or takes 
a hand in is through the eternal laws which He has 
established. In this case the laws of force, the laws 
of resistance and of matter were the hand of God 
that threw the train against the bank ; had the forces 
clashed a little differently the train would have gone 
into the river. No miracle was performed to pre- 
vent it. A good engineer could tell you exactly how 
it happened. And yet the feeling to thank God in 
such a case is a natural one and a worthy one ; it 
proceeds from a true religious attitude of the soul. 

The balance, the adjustment, the equipoise which 
we see in the physical world and which we see in the 
world of man, too, was not brought about by any 
guidance or principle of action that bears the slight- 
est resemblance to human methods and aims ; but is 
the result of eons upon eons of conflict, of clashing, 
of waste and destruction, the fittest or the luckiest 
surviving. What principle of benevolence, or of jus- 
tice, or of wise foresight has regulated the distribu- 
tion of the various human races upon the globe, or 



BRIEF ESSAYS. 229 

determined the relative ascendancy of the various 
nationalities ? Just the principle that determines 
which of a hungry pack of dogs shall get and keep 
the bone you toss them. Think of the wrongs, the 
cruelties, the waste, the slaughters of history. Think 
of that mad carnival of lust and power which the 
history of the Roman Empire alone shows. The past 
of the race is knee-deep with blood, largely innocent 
blood, and the past of nature is black with convul- 
sion and struggle. Admitted that good has come out 
of it all, yet how unlike has been the method to any- 
thing we know as goodness or benevolence. Good 
has come out of it because our constitutions are 
adapted to it. To us it is good ; to differently con- 
stituted beings it might be bad. The principle or 
power which underlies all things is like the principle 
of gravitation, which is exerted equally in all direc- 
tions, and which spares no crashing or crushing, no 
floods of water or downfall of mountains, or subsid- 
ence of continents in bringing about the equilibrium 
which we behold. Some things sink and some things 
swim ; but whichever it be, gravity has its way. 
There is no waste in nature ; waste in nature is but 
taking out of one pocket and putting into the other. 

Prayer is practically a belief in miracles or special 
providences — a belief that the world is governed, 
not by immutable law, but by a being whose favor 
may be won, whose anger may be appeased, or whose 
purpose may be changed like that of a great monarch 
or king. " Most men, in their prayers," says Turge- 



230 INDOOR STUDIES. 

nef, " ask God that two and two may not make 
four." " The best prayers," says Joubert, " are those 
which have nothing distinct, and which thus partake 
of adoration. God listens but to thoughts and senti- 
ments." " To ask is to receive, when we ask for a 
genuine good," because the genuine good is in the 
devout and sincere asking ; but convince your ortho- 
dox neighbor of this and he will probably cease to 
pray. Prayer with him is a petition to some power 
external to himself for some definite, tangible, meas- 
urable good. He will pray for rain or for sun ; and 
the faith which prompts him is a stay to him, whether 
the rain comes or not. The wisest man cannot pray, 
has no need of prayer, because his whole life is an 
aspiration toward, and a desire for, the supreme good 
of the world. 

In every emergency that requires courage and 
presence of mind the great danger is in the fear of 
danger. The man who, lost in the woods or on the 
plains, or going into battle, prays earnestly to God 
for help and guidance has his wits and senses sharp- 
ened and his courage strengthened by that act of 
faith. Because this is so, because mankind have in 
all ages, the pagan as well as the Christian, been 
blessed by sincere prayer to their gods, they have 
come finally to pervert and vulgarize prayer by ask- 
ing for outward material good. To pray for rain is 
like praying for a change in the moon or in the tides 
and seasons. All Christendom prayed for President 
Garfield, but without avail, because the wound was 



BRIEF ESSAYS. 231 

mortal. Did prayer ever stop the yellow fever be- 
fore frost came ? Is it ever safe to let your piety 
offset sanitary observances ? If sewer gas gets into 
your house will holiness keep the distemper out ? 
No ; and vaccination is a better safeguard against 
small-pox than prayer, however fervent and serious. 

What remains, then, for those who cannot pray ; 
who cannot look upon God as a being apart from 
themselves, a supreme parent, seated somewhere in 
the universe, and withholding or bestowing gifts and 
goods upon man ? This alone, and this is enough : 
To love virtue, to love truth, to cherish a lofty ideal, 
to keep the soul open and hospitable to whatsoever 
things are true, to whatsoever things are beautiful, 
to whatsoever things are of good report. 



THE TRUE EEALISM. 

"Without at all aiming to impeach the value of 
what is known in current criticism as realism in art, 
I think it may safely be said that any imaginative 
work, or any work aspiring to the rank of literature 
which does not afford a sure and a speedy escape 
into the ideal, is of little value. 

The true literary artist is not afraid of the real, 
the concrete ; indeed, he loves real things as the 
painter his pigments, but they are only a means to an 
end, and that end is not the literal truth, but the ideal 
truth. Strict fidelity to nature, to fact, is to be de- 
manded, and equal fidelity to the spirit, the imagina- 



232 INDOOR STUDIES. 

tion. The artist must give us a true picture, but he 
must give us much more than that ; he must give us 
himself. 

It is the province of literature to make us free of 
the ideal, and of science to make us acquainted with 
demonstrable fact. It seems to me it matters little 
whether a writer draws his material from what we 
call the real, or from the ideal, so that the result be 
good literature. Why exalt the realist at the expense 
of the idealist ? Why commend Zola's method over 
that of Hawthorne, when both are failures, unless 
they reach and move the imagination, and both suc- 
ceed when they do move it ? 

If in such a connection one may be allowed to 
speak of his own work, I may say that I should think 
much more meanly of my own books than I do, if I 
did not believe that my account of bird, or flower, or 
forest, or stream, contained some stimulus or quality, 
or suggestion, which the reality itbelf does not hold, 
and which is purely the gift of the spirit. Your fact 
or observation is not literature until it is put in some 
sort of relation to the soul. 

There probably never was a time when the craving 
for the real in art, the real as opposed to the fantas- 
tic, the impossible or visionary, was more acute than 
it is now ; but the need and the demand are equally 
urgent for that real to be set in such a light, or in 
such relation to the mind that it fuse readily with 
the spirit and become one with it. The soul of man 
is the source and the only source of that charm which 



BRIEF ESSAYS. 233 

a true work of art possesses. The real itself, however 
faithfully set forth, has no charm. A photograph is 
barren ; the rudest sketch of the same, seen by a true 
artist, has far more power to touch and move the 
soul. Only the man who looks upon the real with 
passion, with emotion, will succeed in transmuting it 
into something higher, and thus permanently interest 
mankind in it. And if he looks upon the imaginary, 
the fantastic, with passion and emotion, he will inter- 
est mankind in that also. He will make that real 
and living to us. 

" The highest problem of any art," says Goethe, 
" is to produce by semblance the illusion of some 
higher reality. But it is a false endeavor to realize 
the appearance until at last only something commonly 
real remains." 

I think the complaint one has to make of the cur- 
rent realistic fiction is that it fails to produce this 
" illusion of some higher reality." It rests with the 
" commonly " or meanly realistic. After we have 
finished the book, we feel as if we had been in the 
company of people whose acquaintance was not worth 
the making. They are or may be copied from our 
friends and acquaintances, but there is this difference : 
In real life, there is something, it may not be easy to 
say just what, that gives pathos and significance to 
the most humdrum and frivolous — something that 
points to the higher reality ; but in the story the peo- 
ple are cut off, isolated, and we feel only their petti- 
ness or silliness. It is often said that the commonest 



234 INDOOR STUDIES. 

and dullest life, if truly written, would have some- 
thing of perennial interest ; but it must be sympathet- 
ically written and shown off against a proper back- 
ground. There are few more commonplace characters 
in themselves in fiction than Partridge in " Tom 
Jones," but Partridge witnessing his first play at the 
theatre is immortal. The meanest life has poetry in 
it, but it takes a poet to bring the poetry out. In 
writing " Werther," Goethe said he succeeded in 
breathing into the work " all that warmth which leaves 
no distinction between the poetical and the actual." 
Whether or not it was realistic in the sense that it 
was a faithful picture of the life of his times is of 
little moment, compared with the question : Was it 
vital and serious, or informed with real passion ? 
And if the passion of the story or poem is real, do we 
care for any other reality ? If the mood and temper 
in which an author contemplates his subject are gen- 
uine, his realism will take care of itself. 

Paradoxical as it may seem, it is only the idealist 
who can adequately deal with the real, who can fuse 
it and use it and bring out its full significance. 
There may be a barren realism, just as well as a bar- 
ren idealism ; the proper marriage of the two is the 
end and aim of art. To make the idea tangible to us, 
whether in poetry or in prose, so that the mind can 
rest upon it, and feel braced and excited by it, is not 
that also an end to be aimed at ? And, on the other 
hand, to make the actual, the concrete fluid and plas- 
tic, and inform it with meaning and power, is not 



BRIEF ESSAYS. 235 

that also to be striven for ? In the same proportion 
in which literature is real, must it also be ideal ; just 
so much earth as there is, just so much sky must arch 
over it. The actual must be transmuted, the ideal 
must be embodied ; both must be brought within the 
sphere of the spiritual faculty and fixed there. If 
the novelist transfers to his page the real life about 
him and adds no charm or illusion or suggestion from 
his own spirit, he is less a realist than he is a materi- 
alist ; his work has little value. The writers who can 
describe the actual and make it real to us, tbat is, 
make us share their experience and their emotion, are 
very rare. They tell us what they saw or what they 
felt, but they do not put the reader in the presence of 
the actual thing, or occurrence. How many histori- 
ans make the past alive again for us ? Only the man 
with an enormous grasp of the ideal, or great imag- 
inative power can do it. Shakespeare can do it, Car- 
lyle can do it. "What a sense of reality in all Car- 
lyle's histories. The dead reality is not enough, it 
must be made alive again. Equally few are the writ- 
ers who can make the ideal tangible or warm to us. 

In any case, whatever the theme, the first requisite 
in the mind of the writer is a vivid sense of reality. 
I sometimes think this sense of reality the main thing 
which distinguishes the master from the tyro. In the 
great writer, in whatever field, we encounter real 
tilings, real values, real differences, real emotions, 
real impressions ; his sense of reality always saves 
him from phantoms. The mind in which this sense 



236 INDOOR STUDIES. 

of reality is weak, no matter whether it deals with the 
concrete or the abstract, will always fail to make an 
impression. 

For my part I want no better realists than the 
great masters of the ideal, from Homer down to Haw- 
thorne and Turgenef. How they all differ both in 
their material and treatment, but in the page of each 
you encounter that reality, that sense of substance and 
vitality which are to the mind what the ground is to 
the foot, or the air to the lungs. 

LITERARY FAME. 

Goldsmith, according to Boswell, said that he had 
come too late into the world ; that Pope and other 
poets had carried off all the literary prizes, etc. Dr. 
Johnson confirmed the remark, and said it was dif- 
ficult to get literary fame and was every day becom- 
ing more and more difficult. This is probably the 
feeling of all writers who have reached the measure 
of their powers ; they mistake the limits of their own 
tether for the end of the world. The possibilities 
that are not open to them they think do not exist. A 
man of genius and power makes the world his own, 
and when he is done Avith it he fancies there is noth- 
ing left. Every one of us repeats the same experi- 
ence on a different scale. As our careers draw to a 
close, we fancy we have exhausted the whole of life 
and that there will be nothing left for those who are 
to come after us. But life is always new to the new 



BRIEF ESSAYS. 237 

man. Think of the great names in British litera- 
ture since Goldsmith and Johnson ; think of Burns, 
Wordsworth, Scott, Byron, Dickens, Macaulay, Car- 
lyle, Arnold, etc., each one of whom, probably, in ex- 
hausting his own possibilities fancied he had exhausted 
the possibilities of nature. 

Probably literary fame is no more difficult of 
achievement at one time than at another, just as easy 
to Thackeray as it was to Goldsmith ; and this not- 
withstanding an achievement that would have given 
a measure of fame a century ago would attract far 
less attention to-day. Is it at all likely that if the 
" Spectator " essays were written to-day they would 
attract any considerable notice, or that " The Idler " 
and " Adventurer " would find any readers ? But 
the writer of to-day has all this past to stand upon, 
he profits by all these accumulated achievements. 
A man is largely the creature of his times ; he is 
strong by the strength of the age in which he lives. 
An invention that would have seemed marvelous a 
century ago might be a very tame affair to-day, and 
yet the same genius, the same power in achieving a 
noteworthy result to-day, would probably have no 
more obstacles to overcome, or mysteries to solve, 
than one hundred years ago. He has a great fund 
to work with ; he sees farther because he stands 
higher. If the achievement is measured by the 
standard of to-day, it is to be remembered that the 
achiever is strong by the strength of to-day. The 
same in science. Now the quarry is so thoroughly 



238 INDOOR STUDIES. 

opened, larger and more valuable results ought to be 
easier than ever before. Of course the poet or liter- 
ary man cannot avail himself of the results of the 
labor of others in the same way the man of science 
can and does, but he cannot escape the general lift of 
the age in which he lives ; he shares in the momen- 
tum, moral and intellectual, of his contemporaries. 
In a certain sense also he inherits, as an available 
personal fund, what others have done before him. It 
is the common mind which has been refined and en- 
larged, and of this advantage he partakes. Literature 
is an investment of genius which pays dividends to 
all subsequent times. 

If nature were guilty of endless repetition in turn- 
ing out men of exceptional powers, of course every 
new man would find his task already done in the 
world ; but nature forever varies the pattern so that 
the new man has a new standpoint and sees things in 
new combinations and discovers new values, and he 
is never forestalled by those who have gone before 
him. Every new genius is an impossibility until he 
appears ; we cannot forecast his type. He is a reve- 
lation, and through his eyes we shall see undreamed-of 
effects. It is doubtful if contemporary writers of orig- 
inal power ever stand in each other's way. There is 
always room and demand for any number of original 
men. The lesser poets of course suffer in competition 
with the greater ; the large stars draw our eyes away 
from the smaller ; we should make more of Bayard 
Taylor, for instance, if he was our only poet ; but is 



BRIEF ESSAYS. 239 

it probable that Longfellow or Whittier or Bryant or 
Emerson ever intercepted any portion of the fame 
due and within reach of the other ? Have Tennyson 
or Browning in any sense ever been rivals ? Literary 
fame is not a limited quantity which must lessen in 
proportion as it is divided up, but, like the sunlight, 
each man may have it all and not rob his neighbor. 
Inventors and discoverers and men of science may 
anticipate each other, but literary genius can never 
be anticipated ; the value of the gift which it brings 
is in its uniqueness. I heard it remarked the other 
day of one of our promising young poets that his work 
lacked flavor. It is this flavor which is indispensa- 
ble and which can never be forestalled by another. 
There is rivalry in the trades and the professions, but 
you poet, or you novelist, or you essayist, if your 
work has flavor or character of its own, your chance 
for fame is just as good as if there were no competi- 
tors in the field. It is not a vacant niche in the 
Temple of Fame which you are striving for, and 
which only one can fill : it is a niche in the hearts of 
men, where the room is boundless. 

Goldsmith felt himself under the shadow of Pope's 
great fame, but of course he was a gainer from Pope's 
career. His performance was as unique as Pope's 
and has probably been of more service to mankind. 
But Pope cleared and sharpened the mind of his age ; 
dull wits found less acceptance after than before him, 
and in this benefit Goldsmith, like others, was a 
sharer. 



AN EGOTISTICAL CHAPTER. 

A few years ago the editor of a popular magazine 
inveigled a good many people, myself among the 
number, into writing about themselves and their expe- 
riences in life. None of us, I imagine, needed very 
much persuading, for as a rule there is no subject 
which a man or woman is more ready or willing to 
talk about than him or herself. One's ailments is al- 
ways a favorite subject ; next to that one's luck or ill 
luck in his last undertaking, then one's experiences, 
one's likes and dislikes, and lastly self-analysis and 
criticism. And it has been said that a man " is never 
so sure to please as when he writes of himself with 
good faith, and without affectation." Aye, there 's the 
rub ; to write of one's self without affectation ! A false 
note of this kind is fatal to the interest and value of 
the criticism. 

In a certain sense a man of the literary or artistic 
tempex*ament never portrays or writes of anything 
but himself ; that is, he gives us things as seen 
through the intimate personal medium which he him- 
self is. All things reflect his hue and quality. This 
is the bane of science, but it is the life of literature. 
I have probably unwittingly written myself in my 
books more fully and frankly than I ever can by any 



AN EGOTISTICAL CHAPTER. 241 

direct confession and criticism ; but the latter may- 
throw some side light at least, and on looking over 
what I wrote for the editor above referred to I find 
that portions of it possess a certain interest and value 
to myself, and therefore I trust may not seem en- 
tirely amiss to my reader. 

If a man is not born into the environment best 
suited to him, he, as a rule, casts about him until he 
finds such environment. My own surroundings and 
connections have been mainly of the unliterary kind. 
I was born of and among people who neither read 
books nor cared for them, and my closest associations 
since have been with those whose minds have been 
alien to literature and art. My unliterary environ- 
ment has doubtless been best suited to me. Proba- 
bly what little freshness and primal sweetness my 
books contain is owing to this circumstance. Con- 
stant intercourse with bookish men and literary cir- 
cles I think would have dwarfed or killed my literary 
faculty. This perpetual rubbing of heads together 
as in the literary clubs, seems to result in literary 
sterility. In my own case at least what I most 
needed was what I had, — a few books and plenty of 
real things. I never had any aptitude for scholarly 
attainments ; my verbal or artificial memory, so to 
speak, was poor, but my mind always had a certain 
magnetic or adhesive quality for things that were 
proper to it and that belonged to me. 

I early took pleasure in trying to express myself, 
upon paper, probably in my sixteenth or seventeenth 



242 INDOOR STUDIES. 

year. In my reading I was attracted by everything 
of the essay kind. In the libraries and book-stores 
I was on the lookont for books of essays. And I 
wanted the essay to start, not in a casual and inconse- 
quential way, but the first sentence must be a formal 
enunciation of a principle. I bought the whole of 
Dr. Johnson's works at a second-hand book-store in 
New York, because, on looking into them, I found 
his essays appeared to be of solid essay-stuff from be- 
ginning to end. I passed by Montaigne's Essays at 
the same time, because they had a personal and gos- 
sipy look. Almost my first literary attempts were 
moral reflections, somewhat in the Johnsonian style. 
I lived on the " Rambler " and the " Idler " all one 
year, and tried to produce something of my own in 
similar form. As a youth I was a philosopher ; as 
a young man I was an Emersonian ; as a middle- 
aged man I am a literary naturalist ; but always have 
I been an essayist. 

It was while I was at school, in my nineteenth 
year, that I saw my first author ; and I distinctly re- 
member with what emotion I gazed upon him, and 
followed him in the twilight, keeping on the other 
side of the street. He was of little account, — a man 
who had failed as a lawyer, and then had written a 
histoiy of Poland, which I have never heard of since 
that time ; but to me he was the embodiment of the 
august spirit of authorship, and I looked upon him 
with more reverence and enthusiasm than I had ever 
before looked upon any man. I do not think I 



AN EGOTISTICAL CHAPTER. 243 

could have approached and spoken to him on any 
consideration. I cannot at this date divine why I 
should have stood in such worshipful fear and awe of 
this obscure individual, but I suppose it was the in- 
stinctive tribute of a timid and imaginative youth to 
a power which he was just beginning vaguely to see, 
— the power of letters. 

It was at about this time that I first saw my own 
thoughts in print, — a communication of some kind 
to a little country paper published in an adjoining 
town. In my twenty-second or twenty-third year I 
began to send rude and crude essays to the magazines 
and to certain New York weekly papers, but they 
came back again pretty promptly. I wrote on such 
subjects as " Revolutions," " A Man and his Times," 
" Genius," " Individuality," etc. At this period of 
my life I was much indebted to Whipple, whose style 
as it appears in his earlier essays and in the thin vol- 
ume of lectures published by Ticknor, Reed & Fields 
about 1853 is, in my judgment, much better than in 
his later writings. It was never a good style, not 
at all magnetic or penetrating, but it was clear and 
direct, and to my mind, at that period, stimulating. 
Higginson had just begun to publish his polished es- 
says in the " Atlantic ; " and I found much help in 
them also. They were a little cold, but they had the 
quality which belongs to the work of a man who looks 
upon literature as a fine art. My mind had already 
begun to turn to outdoor themes, and Higginson 
gave me a good send-off in this direction. But the 



244 INDOOR STUDIES. 

master-enchanter of this period of my life and of 
many following years was Emerson. While at school, 
in my nineteenth year, in my search for essays I had 
carried to my room one volume of his, hut I could do 
nothing with it. What, indeed, could a Johnsonian 
youth make of Emerson ? A year or so later I again 
opened one of his books in a Chicago book store, and 
was so taken with the first taste of it that I then and 
there purchased the three volumes, — the Essays and 
the Miscellanies. All that summer I fed upon them 
and steeped myself in them : so that when, a year or 
two afterwards, I wrote an essay on " Expression " 
and sent it to the "Atlantic," it was so Emersonian 
that the editor thought some one was trying to palm 
off on him an early essay of Emerson's which he had 
not seen. Satisfying himself that Emerson had pub- 
lished no such paper, he printed it in the November 
number of 1860. It had not much merit. I re- 
member this sentence, which may contain some truth 
aptly put : " Dr. Johnson's periods act like a lever of 
the thn-d kind : the power applied always exceeds 
the weight raised." 

It was mainly to break the spell of Emerson's in- 
fluence and get upon ground of my own that I took 
to writing upon outdoor themes. I wrote half a 
dozen or more sketches upon all sorts of open-air 
subjects, which were published in the New York 
" Leader." The woods, the soil, the waters, helped 
to draw out the pungent Emersonian flavor and re- 
store me to my proper atmosphere. But to this day 



AN EGOTISTICAL CHAPTER. 245 

I am aware that a suggestion of Emerson's manner 
often crops out in my writings. His mind was the 
firmer, harder substance, and was bound to leave its 
mark upon my own. But, in any case, my debt to 
him is great. He helped me to better literary ex- 
pression, he quickened my perception of the beauti- 
ful, he stimulated and fertilized my religious nature. 
Unless one is naturally more or less both of a 
religious and of a poetic turn, the writings of such 
men as Emerson and Carlyle are mainly lost upon 
him. Two thirds of the force of these writers, at 
least, is directed into these channels. It is the qual- 
ity of their genius, rather than the scope and push of 
their minds, that endears them to us. They quicken 
the conscience and stimulate the character as well as 
correct the taste. They are not the spokesmen of 
science or the reason, but of the soul. 

About this period I fell in with Thoreau's " Wal- 
den ; " but I am not conscious of any great debt to 
Thoreau : I had begun to write upon outdoor themes 
before his books fell into my hands, but he undoubt- 
edly helped confirm me in my own direction. He was 
the intellectual child of Emerson, but added a certain 
crispness and pungency, as of wild roots and herbs, 
to the urbane philosophy of his great neighbor. But 
Thoreau had one trait which I always envied him, 
namely, his indifference to human beings. He seems 
to have been as insensible to people as he was open 
and hospitable to Nature. It probably gave him 
more pleasure to open his door to a woodchuck than 
to a man. 



246 INDOOR STUDIES. 

Let me confess that I am too conscious of persons, 
— feel them too much, defer to them too much, and 
try too hard to adapt myself to them. Emerson 
says, " A great man is coming to dine with me : I do 
not wish to please him, I wish that he should wish to 
please me." I should he sure to overdo the matter 
in trying to please the great man : more than that, 
his presence would probably take away my appetite 
for my dinner. 

In speaking of the men who have influenced me, 
or to whom I owe the greatest debt, let me finish the 
list here. I was not born out of time, but in good 
time. The men I seemed to need most were nearly 
all my contemporaries ; the ideas and influences 
which address themselves to me the most directly 
and forcibly have been abundantly current in my 
time. Hence I owe, or seem to owe, more to con- 
temporary authors than to the men of the past. I 
have lived in the present time, in the present hour, 
and have invested myself in the objects nearest at 
hand. Besides the writers I have mentioned, I am 
conscious of owing a debt to Whitman, Ruskin, Ar- 
nold, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Tennyson. To 
Whitman I owe a certain liberalizing influence, as 
well as a lesson in patriotism which I could have got 
in the same measure from no other source. Whit- 
man opens the doors, and opens them wide. He 
pours a flood of human sympathy which sets the 
whole world afloat. He is a great humanizing power. 
There is no other personality in literature that gives 



AN EGOTISTICAL CHAPTER. 247 

me such a sense of breadth and magnitude in the 
purely human and personal qualities. His poems are 
dominated by a sense of a living, breathing man as no 
other poems are. This would not recommend them 
to some readers ; but it recommends them to such as 
myself, who value in books perennial human qualities 
above all things. To put a great personality in poetry 
is to establish a living fountain of power, where the 
jaded and exhausted race can refresh and renew it- 
self. 

To a man in many ways the opposite of Whitman, 
who stands for an entirely different, almost antago- 
nistic, order of ideas, — to wit, Matthew Arnold, — 
I am indebted for a lesson in clear thinking and clean 
expression such as I have got from no other. Ar- 
nold's style is probably the most lucid, the least em- 
barrassed by anything false or foreign, of that of any 
writer living. His page is as clear as science and as 
vital and flexible as poetry. Indeed, he affords a 
notable instance of the cool, impartial scientific spirit 
wedded to, or working through, the finest poetic deli- 
cacy and sensibility. 

I have not been deeply touched or moved by any 
English poet of this century save Wordsworth. 
Nearly all other poetry of nature is tame and insin- 
cere compared with his. But my poetic sympathies 
are probably pretty narrow. I cannot, for instance, 
read Robert Browning, except here and there a short 
poem. The sheer mechanical effort of reading him, 
of leaping and dodging and turning sharp corners to 



248 INDOOR STUDIES. 

overtake his meaning, is too much for me. It makes 
my mental bones ache. It is not that he is so subtile 
and profound, for he is less in both these respects 
than Shakespeare, but that he is so abrupt and ellip- 
tical and plays such fantastic tricks with syntax. 
His verse is like a springless wagon on a rough road. 
He is full of bounce and vigor, but it is of the kind 
that bruises the flesh and makes one bite his tongue. 
Swinburne has lilt and flow enough, certainly, and 
yet I cannot read him. He sickens me from the op- 
posite cause : I am adrift in a sea of melodious 
words, with never an idea to cling to. There is to 
me something gruesome and uncanny about Swin- 
burne's poetry, like the clammy and rapidly-growing 
fungi in nature. It is not health but disease ; it is 
not inspiration, but a mortal flux. The " Saturday 
Review," in noticing my last volume, " Signs and 
Seasons," intimates that I might have found better 
specimens of sea-poetry to adorn the chapter called 
" A Salt Breeze " in Mr. Swinburne than those I 
have given, and quotes the following stanzas from 
him as proof : — 

" Hardly we saw the high moon hanging, 
Heard hardly through the windy night 
Far waters ringing, low reefs clanging, 
Under wan skies and waste white light. 

" With chafe and change of surges chiming, 
The clashing channels rocked and rang 
Large music, wave to wild wave timing, 
And all the choral waters sang." 



AN EGOTISTICAL CHAPTER. 249 

Words, words, words ! and all struck with the leprosy 
of alliteration. Such poetry would turn my blood to 
water. " Wan skies and waste white light," — are 
there ever any other skies or any other light in Swin- 
burne ? 

But this last is an ill wind which I fear can blow 
no good to any one. I have lived long enough to 
know that my own private likes and dislikes do not 
always turn out to be the decrees of the Eternal. 
Some writers confirm one and brace him where he 
stands ; others give him a lift forward. I am not 
aware that more than two American writers have 
been of the latter service to me, — Emerson and 
Whitman. Such a spirit as Bryant is confirmatory. 
I may say the same of Whittier and Longfellow. I 
owe to these men solace and encouragement, but no 
new territory. 

Still, the influences that shape one's life are often 
so subtile and remote, and of such small beginning, 
that it will not do to be too positive about these mat- 
ters. At any rate, self-analysis is a sort of back- 
handed work, and one is lucky if he comes at all near 
the truth. 

As such a paper must of necessity be egotistical, 
let me not flinch in any part of my task on that ac- 
count. 

What little merit my style has is the result of much 
study and discipline. I have taught myself always 
to get down to the quick of my mind at once, and not 
fumble about amid the husks at the surface. Unless 



250 INDOOR STUDIES. 

one can give the sense of vitality in his pages, no 
mere verbal brightness or scholarly attainments will 
save him. In the best writing every sentence is filled 
with the writer's living, breathing quality, just as in 
the perfected honey-comb every cell is filled with 
honey. But how much empty comb there is even in 
the best books ! I wish to give an account of a bird, 
or a flower, or of any open-air scene or incident. My 
whole effort is to see the thing just as it was. I ask 
myself, " Exactly how did this thing strike my mind ? 
What was prominent ? What was subordinated ? " 
I have been accused of romancing at times. But it 
is not true. I set down the thing exactly as it fell 
out. People say, " I do not see what you do when I 
take a walk." But for the most part they do, but 
the fact as it lies there in nature is crude and raw : 
it needs to be brought out, to be passed through the 
heart and mind and presented in appropriate words. 
This humanizes it and gives it an added charm and 
significance. This, I take it, is what is meant by 
idealizing and interpreting Nature. We do not add 
to or falsely color the facts : we disentangle them, 
and invest them with the magic of written words. 

To give anything like vitality to one's style, one 
must divest one's self of any false or accidental or 
factitious mood or feeling, and get down to his real 
self, and speak as directly and sincerely as he does 
about his daily business or affairs, and with as little 
affectation. One may write from the outside of his 
mind, as it were, write and write, glibly and learn- 



AN EGOTISTICAL CHAPTER. 251 

edly, and make no impression ; but when one speaks 
from real insight and conviction of his own, men are 
always glad to hear him, whether they agree with 
him or not. So much writing or speaking is like 
mere machine-work, as if you turned a crank and the 
piece or discourse came out. It is not the man's real 
mind, his real exjjerience. This he does not know 
how to get at ; it has no connection with his speak- 
ing or writing faculty. How rare are real poems, — 
poems that spring from real feeling, a real throb of 
emotion, and not from a mere surface-itching of the 
mind for literary expression ! The world is full of 
" rhyming parasites " as Milton called them. The 
great mass of the poetry of any age is purely artifi- 
cial, and has no root in real things. It is a kind of 
masquerading. The stock poetic forms are masks be- 
hind which the poetlings hide their real poverty of 
thought and feeling. In prose one has no such fac- 
titious aids ; here he must stand upon his own mer- 
its ; he has not the cloak of Milton, or Tennyson, or 
Spenser, to hide in. 

It is, of course, the young writer who oftenest fails 
to speak his real mind or to speak from any proper 
basis of insight and conviction. He is carried away 
by a fancy, a love of novelty, or an affectation of 
originality. The strange things, the novel things, 
are seldom true. Look for truth under your feet. 
To be original, Carlyle said, is to be sincere. When 
one is young, how many discoveries he makes, — real 
mares'-eggs, which by and by turn out to be nothing 
but field-pumpkins ! 



252 INDOOR STUDIES. 

Men who, like myself, are deficient in self-asser- 
tion, or whose personalities are flexible and yielding, 
make a poor show in politics or business, but in cer- 
tain other fields these defects have their advantages. 
In action, Renan says, one is weak by his best 
qualities, — such, I suppose, as tenderness, sympathy, 
religiousness, etc., — and strong by his poorer, or at 
least his less attractive, qualities. But in letters the 
reverse is probably true. How many of us owe our 
success in this field to qualities which in a measure 
disqualified us for an active career ! A late writer 
upon Carlyle seeks to demonstrate that the " open 
secret of his life " was his desire to take a hand in 
the actual affairs of English politics ; but it is quite 
certain that the traits and gifts which made him such 
a power in literature — namely his tremendous imag- 
ination and his burdened prophetic conscience — 
would have stood in his way in dealing with the 
coarse affairs of this world. 

In my own case, what hinders me with the world 
helps me with impersonal Nature. I do not stand in 
my own light. My will, my personality, offer little 
resistance : they let the shy delicate influences pass. 
I can surrender myself to Nature without effort, but 
am more or less restrained and self-conscious in the 
presence of my fellows. Bird and beast take to me, 
and I to them. I can look in the eye of an ugly dog 
and win him, but with an ugly man I have less suc- 
cess. 

I have unmistakably the feminine idiosyncrasy. 



AN EGOTISTICAL CHAPTER. 253 

Perhaps this is the reason that my best and most en- 
thusiastic readers appear to be women. In the gen- 
esis of all my books feeling goes a long way before 
intellection. What I feel I can express, and only 
what I feel. If I had run after the birds only 
to write about them, I never should have written 
anything that any one would have cared to read. 
I must write from sympathy and love, or not at 
all : I have in no sort of measure the gift of the 
ready writer who can turn his pen to all sorts of 
themes, or the dramatic, creative gift of the great 
poets, which enables them to get out of themselves 
and present vividly and powerfully things entirely 
beyond the circle of their own lives and experiences. 
I go to the woods to enjoy myself, and not to report 
them ; and if I succeed, the expedition may by and 
by bear fruit at my pen. When a writer of my lim- 
ited range begins to " make believe " or to go outside 
of his experience, he betrays himself at once. My 
success, such as it is, has been in putting my own per- 
sonal feelings and attractions into subjects of univer- 
sal interest. I have loved Nature no more than 
thousands upon thousands of others have, but my 
aim has been not to tell that love to my reader, but to 
tell it to the trees and the birds and to let them tell 
him. I think we all like this indirect way the best. 
It will not do in literature to compliment Nature 
and make love to her by open profession and dec- 
laration : you must show your love by your deeds or 
your spirit and by the sincerity of your service to her. 



254 INDOOR STUDIES. 

For my part, I can never interview Nature in the 
reporter fashion : I must camp and tramp with her 
to get any good, and what I get I absorb through my 
emotions rather than consciously gather through my 
intellect. Hence the act of composition with me is a 
kind of self-exploration to see what hidden stores my 
mind holds. If I write upon a favorite author, for 
instance, I do not give my reader sometbing which 
lay clearly defined in my mind when I began to 
write : I give him what I find, after closest scrutiny, 
in the subconscious regions, — a result as unknown 
to me as to him when I began to write. The same 
with outdoor subjects. I come gradually to have a 
feeling that I want to write upon a given theme, — 
rain, for instance, or snow, — but what I may have 
to say upon it is as vague as the background of one 
of Millet's pictures ; my hope is entirely in the feel- 
ing or attraction which draws my mind that way ; 
the subject is congenial, it sticks to me ; whenever it 
recurs to me, it awakens as it were a warm personal 
response. 

Perhaps this is the experience of all other writers : 
their subjects find them or bring the key to their hid- 
den stores. Great poets, like Milton, however, cast 
about them and deliberately choose a theme : they 
are not hampered by their sympathies, nor are they 
prisoners of their own personalities, like writers who 
depend upon this pack of unconscious impressions at 
their back. An experience must lie in my mind a 
certain time before I can put it upon paper, — say 



AN EGOTISTICAL CHAPTER. 255 

from three to six months. If there is anything in it, 
it will ripen and mellow in that time. I rarely take 
any notes, and I have a very poor memory, but rely 
upon the affinity of my mind for a certain order of 
truths or observations. What is mine will stick to 
me, and what is not will drop off. When I returned 
from England after a three months' visit in the sum- 
mer of 1882, I was conscious of having brought back 
with me a few observations that I might expand into 
two or three short essays. But when I began to open 
my pack the contents grew so upon my hands that it 
reached many times the measure I at first proposed. 
Indeed, when I look back over my seven volumes I 
wonder where they have all come from. I am like a 
boy who at the close of the day looks over his string 
of fish curiously, not one of which did he know of in 
the morning, and every one of which came to his hand 
from depths beyond his ken by luck and skill in fish- 
ing. I have often caught my fish when I least ex- 
pected to, and as often my most determined efforts 
have been entirely unavailing. 

It is a wise injunction, " Know thyself," but how 
hard to fulfill ! This unconscious region in one, this 
unconscious setting of the currents of his life in cer- 
tain directions, — how hard to know that! The 
influences of his family, his race, his times, his envi- 
ronment, are all deeper than the plummet of his self- 
knowledge can reach. Yet how we admire the 
ready man, the man who always has complete con- 
trol of his resources, who can speak the right word 



256 INDOOR STUDIES. 

instantly ! My own wit is always belated. After 
the crisis is past, the right word or the right sentence 
is pretty sure to appear and mock me by its tardi- 
ness. 

There is, no doubt, a great difference in men with 
reference to this knowledge and command of their 
own resources. Some writers seem to me to be like 
those military states wherein every man is numbered 
drilled, and equipped, and ready for instant service : 
the whole male population is a standing army. Then 
there are men of another type who have no standing 
army. They are absorbed in mere living, and, when 
the occasion requires, they have to recruit their ideas 
slowly from the vague, uncertain masses in the back- 
ground. Hence they never cut a brilliant figure 
upon paper, though they may be capable of doing 
real heart-felt work. 






OUT-DOOR BOOKS 

Selected from the Publications of 

Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 

4 Park St., Boston ; 11 East 17th St., New York. 



Adirondack Stories. By P. Deming. 18hio, 

75 cents. 

A-Hunting of the Deer ; How I Killed a Bear ; 
Lost in the "Woods ; Camping Out ; A "Wilderness Ro- 
mance ; "What Some People call Pleasure. By Charles 
Dudley Warner. 16mo, paper covers, 15 cents. 

A Week on the Concord and Merrimack 
Rivers. By Henry D. Thoreau. 12mo, gilt top, $1.50. 

Birds and Bees. By John Burroughs. With 
an Introduction by Mary E. Burt, of the Jones School, 
Chicago. 16mo, paper covers, 15 cents. 

Birds and Poets, with Other Papers. By John 

Burroughs. 16mo, $1.25. 

Birds in the Bush. By Bradford Torrey. 16mo, 

$1.25. 

Contents : On Boston Common ; Bird-Songs ; Character 
in .Feathers; In the White Mountains ; Phillida and Coridon ; 
Scraping Acquaintance ; Minor Songsters ; Winter Birds about 
Boston ; A Bird-Lover's April ; An Owl's Head Holiday ; A 
Month's Music. 

Birds through an Opera-Glass. By Florence 
A. Merriam. In Riverside Library for Young People. 

16mo, 75 cents. 

Bird-Ways. By Olive Thorne Miller. 16mo, 

$1.25. 

Cape Cod. By Henry D. Thoreau. 12mo, gilt 

top, $1.50. ' 

Country By- Ways. By Sarah Orne Jewett. 

18mo, $1.25. 



Drift-Weed. Poems. By Celia Thaxter. 18mo, 

full gilt, $1.50. 

Early Spring in Massachusetts. Selections 
from the Journals of Henry D. Thoreau. 12mo, gilt top, 
$1.50. 

Excursions in Field and Forest. By Henry 

D. Thoreau. 12mo, gilt top, $1.50. 

Contents : Biographical Sketch, by E. W. Emerson ; Nat- 
ural History of Massachusetts ; A Walk to Wachusett ; The 
Landlord ; A Winter Walk ; The Succession of Forest Trees ; 
Walking ; Autumnal Tints ; Wild Apples ; Night and Moon- 
light. 

Fishing with the Fly. A volume of original 

Essays on Angling. By Lovers of the Art. Edited by 
Charles F. Orvis and A. Nelson Cheney. With col- 
ored Plates of 149 standard varieties of Flies. With Map 
and Index. Crown 8vo, $2.50. 

Frank's Ranche ; or, My Holiday in the 

Rockies. Being a Contribution to the Inquiry into what 
we are to do with our Boys. By Edward Marston. With 
Illustrations. 16mo, gilt top, $1.25. 

Fresh Fields. English Sketches. By John Bur- 
roughs. 16mo, $1.25. 

The Gypsies. By Charles G. Leland. With 
Sketches of the English, Welsh, Eussian, and Austrian 
Eomany ; and papers on the Gypsy Language. Crown 8vo, 
$2.00. 

The most delightful Gypsy book with which we are ac- 
quainted. — The Spectator (London). 

Homestead Highways. By H. M. Sylvester. 

12mo, gilt top, $1.50. 

Indoor Studies. By John Burroughs. A new 
Book. 16mo, gilt top, $1.25. 

In Nesting Time. By Olive Thorne Miller. 

16mo, $1.25. 

In the Wilderness. Adirondack Essays. By 
Charles Dudley Warner. New edition, enlarged. 18mo, 
$1.00. 

Locusts and Wild Honey. By John Bur- 
roughs. 16mo, $1.50. 



I 



The Maine "Woods. By Henry D. Thoreau. 

12mo, gilt top, $1.50. 

Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada. By 
Clarence King. With Maps. 12mo, $2.00. 

My Garden Acquaintance and a Moosehead 
Journal. By James Russell Lowell. Illustrated. 32mo, 
75 cents. School Edition, 40 cents. 

My Summer in a Garden. By Charles Dud- 
ley Warner. 16mo, $1.00. 

Nantucket Scraps. Being the Experiences of an 
Off- Islander, in Season and out of Season. By Jane G. 
Austin. 16mo, $1.50. 

Nature. « Little Classics," Vol. XIV. 18mo, $1.00. 

Nature, together with Love, Friendship, Do- 
mestic Life, Success, Greatness, and Immortality. By 
R. W. Emerson. S2mo, 75 cents ; School Edition, 40 cents. 

Pepacton. By John Burroughs. 16mo, $1.50. 
Poems. By R. W. Emerson. With Portrait. 

Riverside Edition. 12mo, gilt top, $1.75. 
The collection includes a very large number of poems de- 
voted to nature and natural scenery. 

Poems. By Celia Thaxter. 18mo, full gilt, 

$1.50. 

Our bleak and rocky New England sea-coast, all the won- 
ders of atmospherical and sea-change, have, I think, never 
before been so musically or tenderly sung about. — John G. 
Whittier. 

Poetic Interpretation of Nature. By Principal 
J. C. Shairp. 16mo, gilt top, $1.25. 

Prose Pastorals. By Herbert M. Sylvester. 

12mo, gilt top, $1.50. 

The Round Year. By Edith M. Thomas. Prose 

Papers. 16mo, gilt top, $1.25. 

Rural Hours. By Susan Fenimore Cooper. New 

Edition, abridged. 16mo, $1.25. 

The Saunterer. By Charles G. Whiting. Es- 
says on Nature. Illustrated. 16mo, $1 25. 



Seaside Studies in Natural History. By Alex- 
ander Agassiz and Elizabeth C. Agassiz. Illustrated. 
8vo, $3.00. 
The scene of these " Studies " is Massachusetts Bay. 

Sharp Eyes, A Taste of Maine Birch, The 

Apple, and other Essays. By John Burroughs. 16mo, 
paper covers, 15 cents. 

The Shaybacks in Camp. Ten Summers under 
Canvas. By Samuel J. and Isabel C. Barrows. With 
Map of Lake Memphremagog. 16mo, $1.00. 

The Succession of Forest Trees, etc. By H. 
D. Thoreau. With Biographical Sketch by K. W. Emer- 
son. 16mo, paper covers, 15 cents. 

Summer. Selections from the Journals of H. D. 
Thoreau. With Map of Concord. 12mo, gilt top, $1.50. 

Tenting at Stony Beach. By Maria Louise 

Pool. 16 mo, $1.00. 

Up and Down the Brooks. By Mary E. Bam- 
ford. In Riverside Library for Young People. 16mo, 75 
cents. 

Wake -Robin. By John Burroughs. Revised 

and enlarged edition. Illustrated. 16mo, $1.25. 

Walden ; or, Life in the Woods. By Henry 
D Thoreau. 12mo, gilt top, $1 50. 

Winter. From the Journal of Thoreau. Edited by 
H. G. O. Blake. 12mo, gilt top, $1.50 

Winter Sunshine. By John Burroughs. New- 
edition, revised and enlarged. With Frontispiece. 16mo, 
$1.25. 

Woods and Lakes of Maine. A Trip from 

Moosehead Lake to New Brunswick in a Birch-Bark Canoe. 
By Lucius L. Hubbard. With Indian Place-Names and 
their Meanings, Illustrations, and large Map. 8vo, $3.00. 



*** For sale by all Booksellers. Sent by mail, post-paid, on 
receipt of price by the Publishers, 

HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO. 

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LIBRARY 




